PROGRESS
Guides to the Social Sciences
__TITLE__
Political
Progress Publishers Moscow
Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sdobnikov Designed by Vadim Kuleshov
CONTENTS
PyMHHijeB A. M., KOSJIOB F. A. BOJIKOB M. II. H «p.
nOJIHTHHECKAH BKOHOMHK Ho
This is a translation of a textbook, Political Economy, for other than economic higher schools in the USSR written by a group of authors, including: Academician A. M. Rumyantsev (head), Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences G. A. Kozlov (deputy head), Professor M. I. Volkoy (deputy head), Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences A. G. Mileikovsky, and Professors and Doctors of Economic Sciences M. M. Azarova, M. S. Atlas, R. A. Belousov, V. I. Mantsev, N. I. Mokhov, I. M. Mrachkovskaya, and
P. A. Skipetrov.
This course has been written on the basis of a two-volume textbook, Political Economy, for economic higher schools and economic departments, of which the authors are: Academicians A. M. Rumyantsev and T. S. Khachaturov, Corresponding Members of the USSR. Academy of Sciences 0. T. Rogomolov, G. A. Kozlov, A. G. Mileikovsky, and A. I. Pashkov, Academician of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences I. I. Lukinov, Professors and Doctors of Economic Sciences M. M. Azarova, A. M. Alexeyev, M. S. Atlas, L. A. Afanasyev, R. A. Belousov, Z. N. Belyaeva, M. I. Volkov, I. S. Golubnichy, G. S. Grigoryan, V. I. Dokukin,M. S. Dragilev, A. P. Lyapin, V. I. Mantsev, S. M. Menshikov, N. I. Mokhov, M. G. Moshensky, 1. M. Mrachkovskaya, G. F. Rudenko, M. N. Ryndina, P. A. Skipetrov, A. D. Smirnov, R. I. Tonkonog, S. I. Tyulpanov, and V. A. Cheprakov, and Assistant Professors and Candidates of Economic Sciences N. S. Andreyev, A. V. Morozov, A.'I. Rozhansky, and A. I. Yumashev, with the participation of N. A. Smirnova.
The text was prepared for translation by Professor M. I. Volkov and Corresponding Member G. A. Kozlov.
Chapter one. The Subject-Matter and Method of Political Economy........................
1. Social Production and Its Role in the Development of Human Society..................
2. Correlation between Production, Distribution, Exchange and Consumption.................
3. The Dialectical Unity of the Productive Forces and the Relations of Production. Socio-Economic Formation ......................
4. The Method of Political Economy.........
5. Economic Categories and Economic Laws.....
6. The Class and Partisan Character of Political Economy
Chapter two. Precapitalist Modes of Production . . . .
1. The Primitive-Communal Mode of Production . . .
2. The Slave-Holding Mode of Production.......
3. The Feudal Mode of Production..........
13 13 1720 23 28 32
3536 43
50PART ONE THE CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
Section 1
THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION..............
,,, 1978
English translation of the revised Russian text © Progress Publishers 1983
Printed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
0603000000 63 65 65 5Chapter three. Commodity Production, Commodities and Money.......................
1. The Universal Nature of Commodity Production under Capitalism....................
n
10701-16
* 18-82
014(01)-83
2. The Commodity and Its Properties.......
3. The Form of Value. The Emergence of Money .
4. The Substance of Money and Its Function . .
5. The Law of Value..............
66 70 72 78
3. Formation of the Average Rate of Profit and Conversion
of the Values of Commodities into Prices of Production
154
4. The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall
159
Chapter nine. Commercial Capital and Commercial Profit. Loan Capital and Interest.............
163
1. Commercial Capital and Commercial Profit.....
163
2. Forms of Capitalist Commerce...........
165
3. Loan Capital and Interest.............
167
4. Capitalist Credit.................
169
5. Joint-Stock Companies. Fictitious Capital.....
171
6. The Role of Credit in the Development of Capitalism
and the Sharpening of Its Contradictions......
173
7. The Currency of Money and the Capitalist Society . .
174
Chapter ten. Ground Rent. The Development of Capitalism in Agriculture................
176
1. Capitalist Ground Rent..............
176
2. Differential Rent.................
178
3. Absolute Rent..................
181
4. The Price of Land as Capitalised Rent.......
185
5. The Development of Capitalism in Agriculture . .
186
Chapter eleven. Reproduction _of Social Capital. Economic Crises..............,.....
189
1. The Aggregate Social Product and Its Component Parts
189
2. Simple and Expanded Reproduction of Social Capital
191
3. Lenin's Development of the Marxist Theory of the Reproduction o' Social Capital. The Law of the Priority Growth of the Production of the Means of Production
196
4. The National Income of the Capitalist Society. Its Production and Distribution............
198
5. The Antagonistic Contradictions of Capitalist Reproduction. Economic Crises of Reproduction......
200
6. Cyclical Character of Capitalist Reproduction ....
204
Chapter four. Capital and Surplus Value. The Basic Economic Law of Capitalism............... 82
1. The Conversion of Money into Capital.......
82
2. Labour Power as a Commodity...........
85
3. The Production of Surplus Value..........
89
4. The Substance of Capital: Constant and Variable Capital
91
5. Two Ways of Increasing the Degree of Exploitation
of the Working Class............... 95
6. Three Stages in the Development of Capitalist Industrial Production.................... 99
7. Capitalist Machine Production and the Growing Exploitation of the Workers............. 103
8. The Unity of and Distinction between Absolute and Relative Surplus Value.............. 105
9. Basic Economic Contradiction of Capitalism. Basic Economic Law of Capitalism........... 107
Chapter five. Wages under Capitalism....... 110
1. The Substance and Forms of Wages in the Capitalist Society...................... 110
2. Evolution of the Forms and Systems of Wages ... 113
3. The Magnitude of Wages and the Working-Class Struggle to Increase It ................. 115
Chapter s i x. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation 119
1. Capitalist Reproduction.............. 119
2. Technical Progress and Capital Accumulation .... 123
3. Capitalist Accumulation and the Formation of a Reserve Army of Labour................. 125
4. The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation. Relative and Absolute Worsening of the Condition of the Working Class ...................... 129
5. The Proletarianisation of the Working People and Changes in the Structure of the Working Class under Capitalism Today................. 132
Chapter seven. The Circuit and Turnover7of Capital 136
1. The Circuit of Capital.............. 136
2. The Turnover of Capital. Fixed Capital and Circulating Capital................... 141
3. The Turnover of Variable Capital and Its Influence
on the Annual Mass and Annual Rate of Surplus Value 146
Chapter eight. Profit and the Price of Production . . 149
1. The Conversion of Surplus Value into Profit..... 149
2. The Rate of Profit and Its Factors ......... 152
Section 2
IMPERIALISM IS MONOPOLY CAPITALISM
209A. The Uniformities o/ Monopoly Capitalism......
209
Chapter twelve. The Main Features of Imperialism
212
1. Concentration of Production and Monopolies.....
212
2. Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy . , .
219
3. Export of Capital................
225
4. The Economic Division of the World by Capitalist Alignments ......................
231
5. The Territorial Partition of the World by the Imperialist Powers and the Struggle for Its Repartition ....
236
6. The World Capitalist Economic System......
238
7Chapter thirteen. The Historical Place of Imperialism .......................
244
1. Imperialism Is a Special Stage of Capitalism ...
244
2. Imperialism Is Monopoly Capitalism........
245
3. Imperialism Is Parasitic, Decaying Capitalism . . .
246
4. Imperialism Is Moribund Capitalism, the Eve of the Socialist Revolution ...............
252
5. The Law of Uneven Economic and Political Development of Capitalism................
254
Chapter eighteen. Peculiarities of the Reproduction of Capital Today. Growing Unevenness in the Development of Capitalism and Exacerbation of Its Contradictions ... 313
1. The Scientific and Technical Revolution (STR) and Its Impact on Capitalist Reproduction......... 313
2. Present-Day Cycle and Crises........... 316
3. Development of Crisis Phenomena in the World Capitalist Economic System.............. 320
4. Growing Unevenness of the Development of Capitalism
and Interimperialist Contradictions......... 323
PART TWO
SOCIALISM, THE FIRST PHASE OF THE COMMUNIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
B. The Crisis of World Capitalism
258Chapter fourteen. The Substance of the General Crisis of Capitalism. The Division of the World into Two SocioEconomic Systems and the Struggle between Them . . . 258
1. The Substance of the General Crisis of Capitalism and
Its Stages'.................... 259
2. The Conversion of Socialism into the Crucial Factor of Mankind's Development. Peaceful Coexistence between
the Two Systems, an Objective Imperative .... 262
Chapter fifteen. Development of State-Monopoly
Capitalism..................... 268
1. Growth of Monopoly Capitalism into State-Monopoly Capitalism ................... 268
2. Main Forms of State-Monopoly Capitalism..... 270
3. Monopoly Profit and Growing Oppression by Monopoly Capital of All Strata of the Working People .... 279
4. State-Monopoly Capitalism and Creation of the Prerequisites for Socialism............... 284
Chapter sixteen. The Collapse of the Colonial System of Imperialism. Specific Features of the Newly-Free Countries' Economy ................... 288
1. The Collapse of the Colonial System as a Manifestation
of the General Crisis of Capitalism......... 288
2. Two Ways for the Development of Young National States. Socio-Economic Structures in the NewlyFree Countries.................. 293
3. Socio-Economic Transformations in the Newly-Free Countries .................... 296
Section 3
THE FORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE ECONOMY OF THE SOCIALIST SOCIETY.......
329Chapter nineteen. The Economic Uniformities Underlying the Formation of Socialism and the Stages of Its Development .................... 329
1. The Necessity of a Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism and Its Substance......... 329
2. Basic Economic Sectors in the Period of Transition from Capitalism to Socialism............ 336
3. Transformation of the Multi-sectoral Economy into
a Socialist Economy................ 343
4. The Triumph of Socialism............. 350
5. The Stages of the Economic Maturity of Socialism 355
Section
SOCIALIST PRODUCTION.....
362Chapter twenty. .Social Property in the Means of Production. The Basic Economic Law of Socialism..... 363
1. Socialist Property in the Means of Production ....
363
2. The Nature of Labour and Economic Interests under Socialism ....................
374
3. The Basic Economic Law of Socialism ......
377
Chapter twenty-one. Planned and Balanced Development of the Socialist Economy............ 384
1. The Objective Basis and Substance of the Planned
and Balanced Development of the Economy .... 384
2. The Law of Planned and Proportionate Development
of the Economy................. 391
. 3- Optimal Proportionality of the Economy...... 396
Chapter seventeen. Agrarian Relations and the Condition of the Peasantry in the Capitalist Countries at the Present Stage ....................
3051. Agrarian Relations and* the Working People's Condition in the Agriculture of Imperialist Countries . . . 305
2. The Rural Working People's Struggle Against Oppression by Monopolies and Big Landowners in the Capitalist Countries .................... 309
Chapter twenty-two. under Socialism.....
Commodity-Money Relations
400400 405 408 413
Chapter twenty-eight. The Circuit and Turnover
of Production Assets. Credit in the Socialist Economy . .
499
1. The Circuit of Production Assets.........
499
2. The Turnover of Production Assets.........
504
3. Fixed Assets...................
506
4. Circulating Assets and Assets of Circulation.....
511
5. Credit and Its Role in the Turnover of Production Assets.
The Credit System under Socialism.........
513
Chapter twenty-nine. The Costs of the Enterprise,
the Price System. Net Income and Finance.......
520
1. The Costs of Socialist Enterprises.........
520
2. Prices within the Economic Calculus System ....
525
3. Profit and Profitability..............
531
4. Finances and the Financial System of the Socialist Society .....................
537
Chapter thirty. Specific Features of Economic Calculus
Relations in Agriculture...............
541
1. Reproduction at Agricultural Enterprises ......
541
2. Rent Relations under Socialism..........
545
3. Distribution of the Incomes of Agricultural Enterprises
549
4. Formation of Prices for Farm Produce.......
553
The Necessity and Substance of Commodity Relations
under Socialism .................
Dual Character of Labour.............
Money in the Socialist Society
4. The Law of Value under Socialism
Chapter twenty-three. The Planning of the Socialist Economy.....................
417
1. The Scientific Principles of Planning........
417
2. Organisation and Methods of Planning.......
423
Chapter twenty-four. The Factors of Socialist Production. The Growing Efficiency of Production. The Economic Law of Steady Growth of Social Labour Productivity
428
1. The Conjunction of the Factors of Production ....
428
2. Collective Labour under Socialism.........
435
3. Rising Efficiency of Production: The Chief Source of the Society's Growing Aggregate Product........
439
4. Technical Progress under Socialism.........
445
Chapter twenty-five. Distribution According to
Work. Social Consumption Funds...........
454
1. The Economic Law of Distribution According to Work
454
2. Wages under Socialism..............
459
3. Remuneration of Labour on Collective Farms ....
463
4. Social Consumption Funds.............
464
Section 6
SOCIALIST SOCIAL REPRODUCTION. THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIALISM INTO COMMUNISM ....
Chapter thirty-one. Expanded Reproduction of the Aggregate Social Product..............
1. The Structure of the Aggregate Social Product . . .
2. The Conditions for Expanded Socialist Reproduction
3. The Rates and Proportions of Socialist Social Reproduction .....................
558Chapter twenty-six. tion under Socialism . . .
Accumulation and Consump-
468 468471 474
560560 567
5741. Socialist Accumulation..............
2. Accumulation and the Rising Technical Level of Socialist Production.................
3. Balance between Accumulation and Consumption . .
Chapter thirty-two.
Commodity Circulation in So-
Section 5
THE SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CALCULUS RELATIONS
IN THE SOCIALIST ECONOMY............. 485
Chapter twenty-seven. The Principles of Economic
Calculus ...................... 487
1. The Objective Necessity and Substance of Economic Calculus.......'........... . . . 487
2. The Organisation of Economic Calculus....... 494
cialist Social Reproduction..............
1. The Role of Commodity Circulation in Expanded Socialist Reproduction..............
2. The Market under Socialism and the Planned and Balanced Organisation of Supply and Demand . . .
Chapter thirty-three. Finance, Credit and the Currency of Monej in Socialist Social Reproduction.....
1. The Role of Finance and Credit in Socialist Reproduction ......................
2. Planned and Balanced Currency of Money and Its Role in Socialist Reproduction.............
3. The National Economic Balance..........
587587 595
600 600608 614
Chapter thirty-four. The Uniformities of the Gradual Development of Socialism into Communism .... 618
1. Socialism and Communism............ 618
2. The Building of the Material and Technical Basis of Communism .................. 623
3. Development of Socialist Relations of Production
into Communist Relations of Production...... 628
Section?
TWO WORLD ECONOMIC SYSTEMS
637
Chapter thirty-five. The Socialist World Economic
System...................... 638
1. A New Type of World Economy..........
638
2. The Development of the World Socialist System . . .
645
3. The Mechanisms and Forms of the Socialist Countries' Economic Cooperation...............
649
Chapter thirty-six. Competition of the Two World Economic Systems and the Inevitable Triumph of Communism on a World Scale................ 655
1. Economic Competition of the Two World Social Systems ...................... 655
2. The Socialist Countries' Economic Ties with Non-- Socialist Countries................. 663
3. The Inevitable Triumph of Communism Throughout
the World.................... 665
Chapter one THE SUBJECT-MATTER AND METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
Every science has a specific subject-matter for its inquiry. Political economy is the study of social relations concerning production, or, which is the same thing, the social system of production.
A revolution was carried out by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the whole science of society, including political economy. The subject-matter and method of political economy are characterised in these basic works written by the classics of Marxism-Leninism: Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Introduction (from the Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1858), Engels's Foreword to the first edition of Volume II of Capital, and Anti-Duhring (Part II), and Lenin's review of A. Bogdanov's A Short Course in Economic Science.
1. SOCIAL PRODUCTION
AND ITS ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT
OF HUMAN SOCIETY
Material Production, the Basis of Life in Human Society. The Process of Labour and Its Basic Elements
Marxist political economy starts from the assumption that human vital activity is objectively based in social material production, which includes man's interaction with nature and the whole range of relations which arise in the process.
Man's interaction with nature is the process of labour, which always runs in a definite social form. To proceed it requires: 1) human labour, 2) the object of labour, and 3) the instruments of labour. It is conscious and purposeful
13human activity in the process of which men modify natural objects and adapt them to the satisfaction of their needs. As they make the things they need, men come to know the laws of nature and, in accordance with these, advance in the use of its resources and potentialities.
As man acts on external nature and modifies it, he also modifies his own nature, developing his capacity for work, increasing his knowledge, and using these on an ever wider scale. Labour is of tremendous importance for human development. Labour, says Engels, is "the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself'.^^1^^
The substance of nature on which man acts in the process of labour is known as the object of labour. When this has been acted upon by human labour but is to be further processed, it is known as raw material.
The things man uses to act on the object of labour are known as the instruments of labour. Crucial among these are the implements of labour, whose mechanical, physical and chemical properties are used by men in accordance with their purposes.
In the broader sense, the instruments of labour include all the material conditions of labour without which it cannot proceed. Land is the universal condition of labour. Industrial buildings, roads, canals and similar objects are included among the conditions of labour. The results of the social cognition of nature are embodied in the instruments of labour and in the processes in which they are used for production. The development of technology (and techniques) is the main indicator of the extent to which society has mastered the forces of nature.
Taken together, the instruments of labour and the objects of labour constitute the means of production. These and human labour are inextricably interconnected and interrelated. Instruments of labour are always the product of past labour, but when out of contact with living labour, they lose their importance. For its part, human labour itself does not exist as such, without the means of production. Consequently, the process of labour is not a mechanical combination of its three basic elements. Human labour is effected only as an
organic unity of these three interdependent factors, of which the crucial factor is man himself, his purposeful activity. Man adapts the objects of labour to satisfy his needs; in other words, he creates material values: food, clothes, dwellings, and other objects of personal consumption, and also instruments of labour, raw materials, ancillary materials, and other means of production, that is, the objects of production consumption. The process of labour always results in a product of labour. Considered in the light of its end results, labour appears as productive labour, and the process of labour, as the process of production.
Such are the substance and general features of labour, irrespective of the social form in which it is performed.
Social Production and Its Two Aspects: the Productive Forces and the Relations of Production
The process of labour is always effected by individuals. However, it is society and not the isolated individual that is the necessary prerequisite for the process of labour. Production is always social production.
Marx discovered the two aspects of social production, which are inextricably connected with each other: the productive forces and the relations of production. The productive forces include the means of production and men with a definite store of production experience and labour skills, who set these means of production in motion. Men are the basic element of society's productive forces, which is why it is not right to identify the productive forces with only machinery and other material elements of production.
The productive forces always exist only as social productive forces. When entering in interaction with nature, men simultaneously enter into social relations with each other by means of which this interaction is at all possible. The connections and relations into which men enter in the process of material production regardless of their will or consciousness are known as social production or economic relations.
Social production relations differ from the relations in production which could be called technical production relations. These are relations determined by the arrangement of men in production, and this depends entirely on the organisation of the process of production. But this arrangement
15~^^1^^ Frederick Engels, Dialectics o) Nature, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974, p. 170.
14itself is always effected under definite social relations, which make it possible to effect the process of labour.
Economic relations are primarily property relations, which are dictated by the process of production itself. Marx says: "All production is the appropriation by the individual of natural objects within the framework of a definite social form and by means of it. In this sense, it would be a tautology to say that property (appropriation) is a condition of production.''^^1^^
The appropriation of the means of production engenders special social relations. The relations among men expressing their relations to the means of production and results of labour, whether their own or those of others, are known as property relations. These are a necessary condition for man's participation in the overall production of the means of subsistence and their use. Engels notes that political economy "is not concerned with things, but with relations between persons",^^2^^ although these relations are necessarily connected with things and in definite conditions even appear in a materialised form.
Property relations are the substance of the relations of production and differ by type. Where society as a whole relates to the instruments, objects and results of labour as to its own, we have a type of social property. Wherever only a part of the society or even individuals alone relate to given conditions of social production as to their own, while the rest are alienated from the appropriation of the conditions of production, we have a type of private property.
Bourgeois theorists usually reduce property relations to men's legal, volitional relations to things, thereby depriving property of its socio-economic content and proclaiming private property as man's natural right, which, for that very reason,' is sacrosanct and inviolable.
It is wrong to regard property only as an outward juridical expression of a definite type of production relations, and not as their substance. Marx and Engels repeatedly stressed
that juridical relations were only a reflection of objective economic relations proper to the given mode of production.1 The whole system of relations of production is based on relations of property in the means of production. On the type of property in the means of production depend the content and concrete combination of the general and particular economic interests of the members of a society, its social structure, and the status of individuals in social production.
2. CORRELATION BETWEEN PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, EXCHANGE AND CONSUMPTION
The relations of property in the means of production are the most important within the system of the relations of production, but they are only a part of economic relations. Property relations determine the mode in which men are conjoined with the material conditions of production (means of production) and that is the basis on which they determine all the other economic relations.
In a society dominated by private property'in the means of production, economic relations are inevitably effected through exploitation of man by man. In a society dominated by social property in the means of production, exploitation of man by man has been eliminated and the objective prerequisites created for establishing relations between men on the basis of comradely cooperation, friendly emulation and mutual assistance.
The relations of property in the means of production also determine the corresponding relations of distribution. Where the key means of production are concentrated in the hands of society as a whole (as they are under socialism), the material values created belong to entire society. In that case, they are distributed in the interests of society as a whole, and this makes it possible ever more fully to satisfy each working person's requirements and all-round development. Where the means of production are monopolised by individuals or groups, as they are under capitalism, the results of production are appropriated by these individuals or groups for the purposes of enrichment and domination of
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, "On Proudhon", in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 2, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, pp. 25-26.
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie ( Rohentwurf) 1857-1858, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1939, p. 9.
~^^2^^ Frederick Engels, "Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", in: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 16, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1980, p. 226.
162-0245
17other men. Such a society inevitably presents sharp contrasts of wealth and poverty, with the working people being constantly forced to carry on a bitter struggle to ensure the most necessary conditions for the maintenance of their vital activity and dignity.
The substance of exchange also depends on the prevailing relations of property in the means of production. Exchange can either be planned and balanced or haphazard. It is the type of property that determines whether exchange is deliberately regulated or promiscuous. It may also be either a direct distribution of products, or entail their production as commodities, which are, for that reason, distributed and redistributed through some form of commodity exchange. But commodity exchange is not an everlasting phenomenon. The classics of Marxism-Leninism insisted that the need for it was bound to disappear at a definite stage in the development of society.
The relations of consumption are an important form of economic relations. Political economy does not consider consumption either as a biological or technological process--- that is done by other sciences---but as a link in the chain of reproduction, consumption has always been, and continues to be a matter for economic analysis. Consequently, production, distribution, exchange and consumption are closely interwoven with each other, constituting a stable structure of economic relations, which in its integrity is a coherent process of reproduction.
The various aspects of the relations of production constitute a single whole, each of whose parts interact with each other. Thus, the relations of distribution are the reverse side of the relations of production. While being a result of production, distribution is also an element of production itself, being inextricably connected with property in the means of production and the corresponding mode of exchange of activity among men. Marx says: "Before distribution is distribution of products, it is: 1) distribution of the implements of production and 2)---and this is a further definition of the same relations---distribution of the members of society among the various types of production.... Distribution of products is, evidently, only the result of this distribution.''^^1^^
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der polttischen Okonomie ( Rohentwurj) 1857-1858, p. 17.
L
18The first thing political economy examines is property in the means of production, for property relations have a crucial role to play within the system of production relations.
Bourgeois economists used to separate the production of material values from their distribution, exchange and consumption, insisting that they were independent and connected no more than outwardly, through the successive movement of the product. They saw consumption as being no more than destruction of the product, and so contrasted it with production as a process in which the product was created, a process which they said, was invariable and determined by the universal laws of nature. From this they drew the conclusion that neither production, nor consumption could be studied by political economy, with either the distribution or the circulation of products alone being its subjectmatter. Marx showed these views to be unscientific and proved that while bourgeois economists see that production, distribution, exchange and consumption did have their distinctions, they fail to see also their unity in which they were truly interconnected, and, most importantly, in which they penetrated each other, with production playing the definitive role.
Analysing the unity of the elements of the relations of production, bourgeois economists and revisionists in our day seek to obscure the antagonisms arising in the capitalist mode of production, so completely distorting the objective picture of the development of the capitalist society.
Marx's Introduction, which he conceived as a General Introduction to a major economic work, is of fundamental importance for an understanding of the substance of the relations of production and the interrelation of their various aspects.
Consequently, in the most general terms, the relations of production are determined by the actual appropriation of the means of production by the members of society, i.e., whether all of them consider the means of production as their own, or only some of them do so, while the rest consider them as not their own (as belonging to others). The relations concerning the means of production determine the whole system of relations in the sphere of production, distribution, exchange and consumption, and provide the form for the development of the productive forces. But the relations of production are also determined by the level
and nature of the social productive forces. The unity of these two interdependent elements---the productive forces and the relations of production---constitutes the mode of production.
3. THE DIALECTICAL UNITY OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES
AND THE RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATION
Unity of the Productive Forces and the Relations of Production
Marx remarked that political economy was not technology. In his work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin wrote: "It is not with `production' that political economy deals, but with social relations of men in production, with the social system of production.''^^1^^ At the same time, the classics of Marxism-Leninism devoted much attention to the productive forces, of which the working people are the key component. The productive forces of a society are the objective conditions without whose concrete consideration it is impossible to study the relations of production.
Men's use of the means of production, determined by the relations of property in them, becomes an economic relation and, as such, is part of the subject-matter of political economy, and this was emphasised by Marx: "The machine is no more an economic category than the ox which draws the plough. The contemporary use of machines is one of the relations of our present economic system, but the way in which machinery is utilised is totally distinct from the
machinery itself.''^^2^^
Political economy makes a study of how the productive forces are used under the given relations of production. Taking account of the lines and trends in technical progress, political economy studies the influence of production relations on such progress and its socio-economic consequences. So, the relations of production are analysed as a unity with the productive forces.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia", Collected Works, Vol. 3, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, pp. 62-63.
~^^2^^ Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov in Paris, December 28, 1846, in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975, p. 33.
20Production Relations, Social Structure of Society. Broad Meaning of Political Economy
The social structure of a society is determined by the relations of production. Private property in the means of production brings about the division of a society into opposite classes. It was Lenin who gave a profoundly scientific definition of classes: "Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.''^^1^^
But classes are not an everlasting phenomenon. Human society started out with a classless social structure. Under socialism, there are no antagonistic classes, but only two friendly classes: the working class and the cooperative ( collective farm) peasantry, which do not exploit the labour of others, work for the common interest and seek to reach a common goal, communism. Under full communism, class distinctions will disappear.
Political economy does not consider the political structure of society because it is a part of the superstructure, but it does study the political structure to the extent to which it exerts an influence on the economy. The state, the main form of superstructure, is considered by the juridical sciences. However, political economy does include the state among its problems because it regards the state as an effective economic force.
A historically rooted mode of production with a corresponding superstructure is known as socio-economic formation. Mankind knows five formations: the primitive-communal; the slave-holding; the feudal; the capitalist; and the communist.
Political economy studies the relations of production which are proper to each formation in their origination, development and transition from the lower stage to the higher.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "A Great Beginning", Collected Works, Vol. 29, Progress Publishers. Moscow, 1965, p. 421.
31The consideration of production relations in all formations is political economy in the broad sense of the term. This political economy became meaningful with the origination of the political economy of communism (socialism).
Specific Features of the Political Economy of Socialism
The production relations of each formation have their own specific features. The main features of the communist formation, established by the working class consciously and in an organised way under the guidance of the Marxist-Leninist party, are: prevalence of the relations of the whole people's property in the means of production, relations of comradely cooperation and mutual assistance among all members of the society, who are free from exploitation, and planned and balanced development of the economy for the benefit of the society and all its members.
The production relations of socialism and communism are basically the same because they are phases of one and the same communist mode of production, but the economy of socialism, the first phase of communism, has its specific features. It has two characteristic basic forms of social property in the means of production: state property (property of the whole people), collective farm and cooperative property; distribution of consumer goods according to the work done; commodity-money relations, and certain other specific features.
The role of the state in society's economic activity is another feature of the political economy of socialism. The bourgeoisie makes extensive use of the state to protect capitalist relations of production and consolidate its economic positions; monopoly capitalism is increasingly developing into state-monopoly capitalism, a combination of the power of the monopolies and that of the capitalist state. But interference in the economic life of society and the growth of stateowned property in the capitalist countries does not eliminate capitalist domination, as right-wing socialists and revisionists claim. Engels says that the capitalist state, as an owner of the means of production, operates as a collective capitalist, that is, represents the capitalist class as a whole.
A fundamentally new type of state is established by the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it becomes the instrument of the overwhelming majority
22of the people, led by the working class, and subsequently, once the exploiter classes are eliminated, gradually develops into a state of the whole people. Genuine democracy unfolds with the ever greater involvement of the working people in the administration of the state.
The socialist state, with the property of the whole people in the means of production as its foundation, obtains the capacity for framing economic plans for the benefit of the society as a whole and coordinating the common activity of all the members of the society in the fulfilment of these plans, organising concerted economic management on the scale of the society as a whole.
The socialist relations of production are continuously developing. In the USSR, they now correspond to the stage of developed socialism, in some countries, to the stage when the socialist society has been built in the main, and in others, to the period of transition from capitalism to socialism.
.4. THE METHOD OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
Application of the Method of Materialist Dialectics to Political Economy
The method of the Marxist-Leninist political economy is that of dialectical materialism. It takes the materialist approach to economic processes, and analyses the interconnection and interrelation in development from the lower forms to the higher. It is used to analyse economic phenomena at every stage in the development of social production.
Analysis of social life is a complex process; it runs, "from living perception to abstract thought, and from this to practice".^^1^^ There is a need for painstaking study of the whole array of facts to bring out the substance behind them, to order the historical facts and to bring them into a system, to find the main link which will help to bring out the whole range of problems in the economic life of a society. This can be done only by rising to the stage of scientific thinking, which is a process involving "a series of abstractions, the formation and development of concepts, laws".^^2^^
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Conspectus of Hegel's Book The Science of Logic", Collected Works, Vol. 38, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1963, p. 171.
~^^2^^ Ibid., p. 182.
23Scientific A bstractions
Scientific abstractions are generalised concepts worked out by men by means of thought- and which are abstracts of the immediate concrete nature of the phenomenon being studied. The objective reality is the starting point for scientific cognition.
The economic life of a society is the objective reality which is independent of human will and consciousness, although it does appear as a result of conscious acts by individuals. The economic life of a society is a coherent whole and includes many factors with all the diversity of their connections. Economic relations have a form that is immediately visible, and a content which determines that form, and which is concealed by semblance.
It is the task of political economy to bring out the substance of economic phenomena and their connections in the whole diversity of the concrete, to show the interaction of the sides and the ``struggle'' between them, and in this way to gain a knowledge of the economy as a whole, and master the laws of its development.
Scientific method, as an organic set of dialectico-materialist principles, methods and means of analysis, is not the same for all the sciences. Thus, it is not right to apply the methods of analysis used only in the natural sciences to the study of social processes and phenomena. The relations of production cannot be analysed under a microscope or in a test tube, or subjected to machining by means of mechanical forces. Even a method so widespread in natural science as the staging of experiments can be used within relatively narrow limits in economics. Abstract thought is the most important instrument of the politico-economic cognition of production relations. But it is important to emphasise that scientific abstractions should not be out of touch with reality. This means that there should be no consideration of phenomena outside the context of economic life or their conversion into absolutes; the qualitative and quantitative aspects of economic processes must not be separated and neither of these should be exaggerated out of all proportion, etc.
Analysis and Synthesis
In the process of analysis, thought runs from the visible, from the concrete to the abstract, separating the phenomenon being analysed into its component parts and aspects. In the process of synthesis, the phenomenon is analysed in the light of the interconnection of its constituents, as a unity and in the movement of contradictions, which reveals the ways and forms of their resolution.
The analysis of the capitalist economy, for instance, makes it possible to bring out its essential elements: capitalist property in the means of production, and wage labour. Each of these is first considered separately (the substance of capitalist property, the chief interest of capital, etc., on the one hand, and the nature of wage labour, the chief economic interest of the working class, etc., on the other). They are then studied in interaction with each other (the antagonistic relation of exploitation of wage labour by capital, the definitive importance of the social nature of production, and the epochal role of the working class in the overthrow of capitalism). This is followed by an analysis of the resolution of the contradictions of capitalism by the proletarian revolution, which changes the nature of social production and establishes socialist social production.
The analysis of production relations under socialism starts with an analysis of the economic activity of the society as an integral whole, and not of relations between private property commodity producers, as is done in the political economy of capitalism. Within the framework of this whole, an analysis is made of the two basic forms of property which are inherent in socialism, their interrelations, the unity of interests and purposes. This is followed by an analysis of relations at the individual enterprise (association) as the primary cell of social property and the individual's participation in social production as the co-owner of all the means of production and the results of the common labour. In the socialist society, there is a community of vital economic interests and relations of friendship and cooperation among its classes and social groups. That is why the contradictions which are inherent in the socialist economy---and these are non-antagonistic---are resolved in a balanced manner. Whereas the antagonistic contradictions of capitalism
inexorably propel it to the destruction, the resolution of the non-antagonistic contradictions of the socialist economy in a balanced manner promotes its development into the economy of the higher phase of communism.
Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis
Every economic process and phenom in has a qualitative and a quantitative aspect. That is wliy political economy makes extensive use of mathematical and statistical methods and means of analysis. Mathematical and statistical analysis helps to bring out the quantitative aspect of phenomena and the objective quantitative connection between economic variables.
The present extent to which the economy has been socialised necessitates a thorough and all-round consideration of quantitative economic magnitudes and wide use of computers for these purposes. But the more sophisticated the computer techniques, the greater the potentialities for rapid processing of economic facts (information) on the scale of the economy as a whole, and this can be most fully done only with the predominance of social property in the means of production.
While bringing out the quantitative changes in economic processes, political economy also examines the transition of quantity into a new economic quality. It is not right to study economic phenomena solely in terms of quantity or of quality, as this would be out of tune with the dialectics of life. That is why mathematical and statistical analysis helps to bring out the actual relations only when it is closely connected with the qualitative content of the phenomenon being analysed.
Unity of the 'Logical and Historical Methods
Political economy is a reflection of the actual reality in.its historical sequence, which is why the method of political economy is a historical method. But while on the whole following the historical process, it concentrates on its main factors purged of the accidental elements of the complex development of social life. The historical method of political economy constitutes a unity with the logical method
The logical method, Engels says, "is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies. The point where this history begins must also be the starting point of the train of thought, and its further progress will be simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the course of history, a corrected reflection but corrected in accordance with laws provided by the actual course of history.''^^1^^
The logical and the historical approach in analysing the socialist economy means that the analysis and the synthesis start with the substitution of social property for private property in the means of production, and the origination of socialist social production.
Social Practice and Its Role
Social practice is the final element of the method of the Marxist-Leninist political economy, and the criterion of truth. The constant interplay of cognition and action, theory and practice helps to make concepts objective and, consequently, true, so making it possible for social practice itself confidently to advance. Under socialism, the connection between theory and practice in action by the masses is effected under the leadership of the party of scientific communism and of the socialist state. These set before economic science the tasks which spring from life and apply in practice the conclusions drawn by science, so demonstrating their truth.
Consequently, the method of the Marxist-Leninist political economy rests on the dialectico-materialist world view and constitutes a dialectical logic which is used to analyse economic processes in terms of their unity and distinction, in the process of their historical development. This method reflects the dialectics of the relations of production themselves. The economic practice of society verifies the correctness of the conclusions drawn by political economy.
Political economy also provides the methodological basis for special and sectoral economic sciences.
~^^1^^ Frederick Engels, "Karl Marx, A Contribution of the Critique of Political Economy", in: Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 16, p. 475,
5. ECONOMIC CATEGORIES AND ECONOMIC LAWS Economic Categories
In its analysis of economic relations, political economy formulates logical concepts which are known as the categories of political economy. These are not arbitrary. They are true, to the extent to which the relations of which they are abstractions do exist in reality.
Economic categories are historial. That is why it is highly essential to draw a distinction between historical economic categories. For instance, surplus value and capital are categories of the political economy of capitalism, reflecting that which makes it different from other socio-economic formations. Categories like the property of the whole people in the means of production, planned and balanced development, the surplus product of the socialist society, the national economic plan, socialist emulation, and economic calculus* reflect processes which are characteristic only of socialism.
It is true that there are some categories in political economy which express features common to all economic formations, like the category of production generally, although there is no such thing in reality at all, because production always runs in this or that social form. But whatever the social form of production, it takes the interaction of three elements---labour, the objects of labour, and the instruments of labour---to effect the process of production.
Some economic categories in the political economy of capitalism and in the political economy of socialism have a similar designation, like the category of wages. But in the socialist society, this category does not express the relations between the capitalists and the wage workers, but the relations between the co-owners of the key means of production working in comradely cooperation and mutual assistance. The category of commodity also remains in the new socialeconomic conditions. However, under socialism it is fundamentally different from the category similarly designated under capitalism, because the production of commodities , under socialism is not universal and because it is the associated producers jointly owning the means of production, and not private proprietors, that are the producers of com-
modities. Profit, rent, and similar other economic categories likewise differ fundamentally under socialism and capitalism.
Economic Laws and Their Objective Nature
The substantial objective interrelations and causal connections which are firmly rooted in the economic processes and phenomena and without which it is impossible to consider the relations of production as an integral whole in the process of development are known as economic laws.
The study of the laws of society's economic development is the most important scientific task of political economy. Engels says that political economy "is the science of the laws governing the production and exchange of the material means of subsistence in human society".^^1^^
Economic laws are the laws governing the development of the relations of production, distribution, exchange and consumption. They cannot operate outside the context of human relations, and that is their main distinction from the laws of nature, which operate without the agency of man. This suggests the following question: do or do not economic laws depend on the consciousness and will of men? In other words, what is their nature? That is the basic methodological question of political economy.
Bourgeois economists assert that economic laws are determined by man's immutable nature, so that these laws are everlasting and, in that sense, objective. The advocates of capitalism take this view because they want to prove that the laws of the capitalist society are everlasting, and because they wish to obscure the fact that the capitalist mode of production has effect only within a definite historical period. Actually, economic laws do not spring frfrm nature, but are determined by the relations of men relative to production.
Bourgeois economists, followed by the revisionists, claim that economic laws are objective because they operate haphazardly. Conversely, they assert that because the economic laws of socialism do not operate haphazardly, they are not laws at all, but are no more than "useless generalisations", without any economic significance. Here, the question of the
* For a detailed examination of economic calculus see Chapter twenty-seven.---Ed.
~^^1^^ Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978, p. 181.
29nature of economic laws is forgotten, and the question of the forms of their expression is brought out in its stead. In reality, economic laws are just as objective as the relations of production, that is, they do not depend on the consciousness and will of men, undergoing change together with the changes in the relations of production themselves. But in one set of conditions, economic laws are expressed spontaneously, and in another not spontaneously, but through the deliberate economic activity of men who have become aware of the objective necessity for their acts, activity consciously organised on the scale of the society as a whole.
Specific and General Economic Laws
Each social system of production has its own system of specific economic laws. The substance of a given set of production relations in their entirety is expressed in the basic economic law of the given social system. The essential content of the various aspects of production relations is expressed in specific laws.
The system of the laws of political economy at every stage in the development of society corresponds to the system of economic relations. Thus, the capitalist society, whose basic economic law is the law of production and appropriation of surplus value, of necessity produces the laws of capitalist competition and the anarchy of social production, the general law of capitalist accumulation, the law of the average rate of profit, the law of the price of production, and other laws of the capitalist economy. In the socialist society, the basic economic law is assurance of full well-being for all the members of society and the free and all-round development of the individual through a steady boosting and improvement of social production. There are also the laws of the planned and balanced development of the economy, the law of growing requirements, the law of labour productivity growth, and so on.
The economic laws of socialism begin to operate in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, and are given full scope with the victory of socialism. The development of economic laws reflects the growing maturity of the relations of production and their gradual transformation into communist relations of production. Some economic laws are common to both phases of communism (the basic econ-
omic law, the law of proportional and balanced development, and others), and make for the unity of the system of economic laws of the communist formation as a whole. Other laws are proper only to the first phase of communism, like the law of distribution according to work (according to quantity and quality).
Apart from the specific laws governing the development of production relations, there are general economic laws which are common to all the stages in the development of society. This is, above all, the law of the correspondence of the relations of production to the character and level of development of the productive forces. This law reveals the objective basis on which production relations move to a higher stage. Another general economic law is the law of economy of labour, although it does assume different historical forms in the succession of socio-economic formations.
Apart from the specific and general economic laws, there are laws which operate only at definite stages in the development of social production, like the law of value, which operates wherever there is production of commodities. Under socialism, the production of commodities and, accordingly, the law of value have a specific character, because the functioning of the law springs from other factors than it does under capitalism, because it does not operate haphazardly but is used in a planned and balanced manner, and because the effects of its operation differ radically from those it produces under capitalism.
The substance of production relations is brought out by the whole aggregation of economic laws as a coherent system. Economic laws do not work outside of this system, in isolation from each other, for they are closely interconnected and interwoven with each other. The individual laws can be brought out only in a theoretical analysis, which helps to study each individual law and its structure within the system.
Although economic laws do not depend on the consciousness and will of men, men are not powerless in their presence. Under definite conditions, men can use these laws for their benefit. In contrast to the economic laws of capitalism, which operate spontaneously, the economic laws of socialism are cognised and used by the society.
Society's cognition and use of economic laws does not make these any less objective. The classics of Marxism-Lenin-
31 30ism emphasised that the freedom of men's economic activity does not consist in their being independent of the objective laws of economic development, but in their use for the attainment of definite objectively conditioned goals and in their capacity to take decisions with a knowledge of what they are about.
On the strength of what has been said, it is possible to give a fuller definition of the subject-matter of political economy. Political economy studies the relations of production as the form in which the productive forces develop and, consequently, in close interconnection with them; it makes a study of economic laws, that is, the laws governing the functioning of production, distribution, exchange and consumption at various stages of the development of human society.
for the notions and interests of the capitalist class. Marx says: "It is thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not.''^^1^^ This is an expression of the class and partisan character of bourgeois political economy, whether past or present. But in their efforts to safeguard the obsolescent system, bourgeois economists try to veil their class stand by means of an above-class approach to economic processes and phenomena.
Marxist-Leninist political economy has discovered the objective economic laws governing the development of the society and has substantiated the revolutionary struggle of the working class against capitalism, and for the construction of communism. The interests of the working class are identical with the progressive development of the society. The partisan character of the Marxist-Leninist political economy is in complete accord with the scientific objectivity of its analysis of economic processes. Any departure from the class approach in science signifies a departure from the scientific analysis of social phenomenon. The principle of partisanship is an expression of the unity of the MarxistLeninist economic theory and the fulfilment of practical tasks in the revolutionary struggle to do away with exploitation of man by man and for the building of socialism and communism.
Consistent adherence to the principle of partisanship in science is inseparable from relentless struggle against anticommunism, reformism and right and ``left'' revisionism. Only a theory that does not allow of any falsification of the analysis of social development is truly scientific. The partisanship character of political economy implies a principled stand in evaluating the diverse departures from the Marxist-Leninist methodology in the study of social life, and from the fundamental conclusions drawn by Marxism-Leninism. In contrast to bourgeois political economy, Marxist-Leninist political economy makes no secret of its class and partisan character. It takes an open stand for the working class, which heads the progressive strata of the society in their struggle to effect the historically objective
0. THE CLASS AND PARTISAN CHARACTER OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
As a science, political economy emerged together with the development of the capitalist mode of production. In the period when the bourgeoisie was rising to power as the third estate ranged against feudalism and in the early period of its domination, bourgeois political economy was essentially scientific. The classics of bourgeois political economy (William Petty, Adam Smith and David Ricardo) analysed capitalist relations and "sought and discovered a number of capitalism's 'natural laws', but they failed to understand its transitory character, failed to perceive the class struggle within it".^^1^^
The emergence of the working class as an independent force in the class struggle cast a new light on the basic aspects of economic relations. The class struggle laid bare the substance of capitalist relations and showed that the downfall of capitalism and the triumph of socialism were inevitable. That is why the bourgeoisie wanted an economic science that would help to preserve and consolidate its power. Accordingly, classical bourgeois political economy gave way to vulgar' bourgeois political economy, which is a vehicle
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "Socialism Demolished Again", Collected Works, Vol. 20, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, p. 197.
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Capital, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1972, Vol. I, p. 25.
323-0245
33necessity for the elimination of capitalism and the construe^ tion of socialism.
The political economy of the working class was worked out by Marx and Engels, and raised to a new stage of development by Lenin, who formulated the theory of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, and who laid the foundations of the political economy of socialism. Today, the scientific political economy is being creatively developed by the Marxist-Leninist Communist and Workers' parties.
The writings of the classics of Marxism-Leninism and the documents of the Marxist-Leninist parties and their international conferences and meetings contain a scientific analysis of the struggle of the working masses, led by the working class, for the triumph and establishment of a society of free working people, and for its advance towards communism.
Chapter two PRECAPITALIST MODES OF PRODUCTION
A book written by Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, is the chief work among those written by the classics of Marxism dealing with precapitalist formations. Its historical importance lies in the fact that it presents a Marxist analysis of the primitive society, the life and activity of men in the most ancient, pretribal period, analyses the economic and social features of the tribal system, and the causes for its disintegration and the emergence of private property, classes and the state, and shows their transient nature.
Engels's book is aimed against the bourgeois idea that capitalism is universal and everlasting, and against efforts to modernise the primitive-communal, the slave-holding, and the feudal societies, to make them look like early capitalism.
It opposes the bourgeois apology for private property, assertions concerning its ``natural'' and eternal character, allegedly corresponding to "the nature of man". Engels's book exposes the idealisation of primitive society (the Golden Age of mankind), directed against social progress, and helps in the struggle against the vestiges of patriarchal relations in the world today. Engels shows that all nations develop, in the main, through the same major stages of social production and that-, consequently, there are no `` nonhistorical'' peoples and no ``inferior'' races. This is of major importance in the struggle against the ideology of racism and neocolonialism. Engels rejects the bourgeois notion that the state is a force that stands over and above classes, and demonstrates the inevitable withering away of the state with the transition to a classless, communist society.
3*
351. THE PRIMITIVE-COMMUNAL MODE OF PRODUCTION
According to the latest scientilic data, human society emerged over two million years ago. Of these, only the last 7,000-9,000 years transcend the framework of the primitive society. The primitive-communal system is the first and longest period in human history. Its relations of production are studied by political economy.
The development of the economy in the primitive society falls, according to Engels, into two periods: "the period in which the appropriation of natural products, ready for use, predominated", or the period of the appropriating economy and "the period in which knowledge of cattle-breeding and land cultivation was acquired, in which methods of increasing the productivity of nature through human activity were learnt",^^1^^ or the period of the reproductive economy. In the course of these two periods, the social organisation of the primitive society advanced from the "primitive human herd" to the development of the tribal and then of the neighbourhood (territorial) commune, a way of development that naturally led to the emergence of classes and antagonisms in society.
Predominant Appropriation of Natural Products
The initial state of the productive forces in the primitive society is characterised by primitively made instruments of labour, with the chipped stone being the implement of general purpose. The use of stone implements marks the origination of human labour. Because they were ill-equipped for the struggle against surrounding nature, primitive men were unable to exist or work outside the collective. The work of jointly gathering the natural products which were ready for use and hunting went on over a relatively small ``feeding'' area and involved numerically small and relatively isolated groups of blood relatives. That was simple cooperation without any division of labour by sex or age.
With the development of the appropriating economy and under the impact of growing requirements, the stone imple-
ments of labour were constantly, even if slowly, improved. This was paralleled by the development of man, the chief productive force. Labour activity helped to develop his hands and other organs, and to increase the weight and size of his brain.
Production experience was gradually accumulated and production activity became more complex, and this led to the emergence of the natural division of labour by sex and, to some extent, by age. Women concentrated on gathering, and men on hunting. The old people were the keepers of accumulated collective production experience. They also engaged in the making of the implements of labour. The natural division of labour by sex and age intensified cooperation and increased the productivity of the primitive collective. There was a gradual differentiation and specialisation of the implements of labour, and their adaptation to individual labour operations. In that period, men learnt to make composite implements of labour (stone and wood, wood and bone) and invented the bow and arrow, which extended the range of hunting.
The use of fire by primitive man was of tremendous importance in the development of the productive forces in the period of the 'appropriating economy. The precise date of this event is not known, but there is evidence that fire was already being used 400,000-500,000 years ago. It was women who had the duty of keeping the fire burning on the hearth. The art of obtaining fire by friction was discovered only in the period of the reproductive economy. The discovery of fire is one of mankind's greatest inventions.
In the primitive society, the relations of collective (herd, communal) property in land and the natural products ready for use, that is, the feeding area and the natural objects used by men and serving for the making of the instruments of labour were the definitive form of production relations. The stone and wooden implements were adapted to the physical capacity of the various individuals, so, in effect, becoming their personal property, but one which was used in joint labour and only for the common interests of the collective. There were no antagonistic contradictions in that society. At that time, collective property and collective labour were the only possible forms for tho development of the productive forces.
Bourgeois economists and revisionists deny the initial
~^^1^^ Frederick Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976, p. 209.
37existence of collective property, and identify personal property in the primitive society with private property or assert that personal property produced private property. But scientific history and ethnography have proved that it was not private but collective property that was the economic basis of all the primitive peoples, and that personal property was transformed into private property in the period of disintegration of the primitive-communal system, when private property in the basic means of production first appeared. The collected natural products which were ready for use constituted common property and were subject to general distribution, which was essentially egalitarian. There was no exchange of products either within the groups or between them. The historical facts do not bear out the bourgeois economists' assertions that the exchange of products is
primordial.
In these conditions, primitive men knew in advance what they could expect with their mode of obtaining their means of subsistence. This mode provided the means of subsistence that were alternately scant or more abundant. Production was carried on within the narrowest framework, but the product was entirely at the disposal of the prqducers. Consequently, both production and distribution were effected on the basis of a primitive regulation, and this ruled out any antagonisms in the society.
The objective purpose of primitive production was satisfaction of the vital requirements of all the members of the group. That was the basis on which the natural expansion of the production and reproduction of life in the primitive human society were effected, however slowly, and this was expressed in a growth of the productivity of labour, an increase in the population, and the hiving off of new groups which went on to "use new feeding areas.
In that period, economic life had the following main characteristics: 1) the common property of the primitive collective in the means of production and the territory of the habitat; 2) collective and not productive labour for the appropriation of natural products ready for use; and 3) egalitarian distribution of the means of subsistence. These are the features which determine the content of the basic economic law of the primitive society: with the productive forces at an extremely low level and under the domination of communal property, production is objectively geared to
38ensure the requirements of all the members of the commune through egalitarian distribution of the collectively obtained products which are necessary for maintaining the vital activity of every member of the collective.
This law also contains the main non-antagonistic contradiction of the primitive society which is the motive force behind the development of the primitive economy. It is the contradiction between the vitally necessary requirements of primitive men, and the low level of the development of the productive forces. It is this contradiction that made for the development of society's productive forces and led to a new type of economy, a reproductive economy, and also to the transition from the primitive human herd to the tribal community.
The Reproductive Economy
The gathering of food and hunting led to two great discoveries: agriculture and the breeding of cattle. With the conversion of agriculture and cattle-breeding into the leading branches of economic activity, the primitive society entered upon the period of the reproductive economy, which made men relatively independent of the availability of the ready-made products of nature.
Because of the different natural, climatic and social conditions, some communities moved on to the reproductive economy before others did. Because of local natural conditions, some communities specialised in agriculture and others in the breeding of cattle. The concentration of their efforts in this or that branch helped to raise the productivity of labour, to create stocks of food and markedly to increase the size of the communities.
The development of agriculture and cattle-breeding brought about a further growth of the social productive forces. New methods of making instruments of labour, like sawing and drilling, grinding and the polishing of stone, appeared-. Ever more diverse wooden implements of labour were made. Spinning and weaving emerged. There was a development of water and land transport. In that period, men discovered the useful properties of some metals (copper, bronze and iron). Diverse metal tools, weapons and ornaments appeared. The plough and the chariot were invented in the Bronze Age.
39In the period of the reproductive economy, the relations of production remained basically the same as those in the preceding period. They were expressed in collective property in the means of production, and in the results of communal labour. But the development of the reproductive economy introduced some new features into the relations of production. The communities began to develop different means of subsistence in quantities which exceeded their immediate daily needs. The result was a product that was over and above the immediate requirements of the producers and which could be'accumulated and redistributed. This led to the origination of exchange of products between the communities.^^1^^
The specialisation of the communities, which made for the transition to nomad cattle-breeding, ultimately led to the separation of pastoral tribes from among the whole mass of primitive tribes. That was "the first great social division of labour. These pastoral tribes not only produced more articles of food, but also a greater variety than the rest of the barbarians... This, for the first time, made regular exchange possible.''^^2^^
Archaeology tells us that in the period of the appropriating economy occasional and sporadic exchange did occur, mainly among kindred communities. With the development of the reproductive economy, a new form of connection was established between the individual communities. The connection between the various types of production led to the origination of branches of the social economy that were dependent on each other. Henceforth, products were constantly produced'for exchange, that is, they were converted into commodities (a thing produced for exchange). Exchange became regular.
Factors behind the Disintegration and Downfall of the Primitive Mode of Production
• The first great social division of labour, which produced regular exchange, made for the origination of new economic relations among men. This new type of relations ultimately ruled out the relations of collective'communal property.
The appearance of improved implements of labour and the new methods of work made it possible to abandon collective communal labour in some instances. Thus, with the appearance of the plough in agriculture, the soil no longer had to be tilled collectively. Whereas the obtaining of meat once used to require the efforts of a large group of hunters, this labour became unnecessary with the development of cattle-- breeding. The common dwelling lost its erstwhile economic importance and gave way to individual family homes. At the same time, the tribal community began gradually to develop into the primitive neighbourhood (territorial) community.
Marx designated the primitive neighbourhood (territorial) community as agricultural. In contrast to the tribal communities, it consisted not only of kindred but also of unrelated families independently engaged in farming on the land allotted for their use. In the agricultural community, the house and its appendage, the yard (the homestead), were the private possession of the farmer. Meanwhile, the cultivated land remained the property of the community, and was periodically redistributed among'itsmembers. Pastures, wastelands and forests also remained common property. But it was the individual family which cultivated the farmland, and also appropriated crop. In this way, in the neighbourhood community private property emerged alongside collective property.
This interlacing of two principles (the dualism of the neighbourhood community) was fraught with deep contradictions. Private property was a negation of collective property, and that is why the commune carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction.
The emergence of parcel labour was the main element in the disintegration of the neighbourhood community. It was the source of private appropriation and the accumulation of property in kind and as treasure. This property of the family was no longer subject to the community's control, and became the object of individual commodity exchange and the enrichment of private property holders. The fragmentation of labour among the families which had set up on their own tended to undermine the common property in cultivated land and then also in the meadows, pastures, forests, and so on. With the passage of time, these also turned into private property.
~^^1^^ See, Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 332.
a Frederick Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, pp. 317-318.
40 41The ever more complex organisation of production in the neighbourhood community and of the other aspects of its social life also added complexity to the functions of administration. The elders were gradually released from direct participation in the collective production processes as persons performing social functions required by the community. Making use of their privileged status, they began to appropriate a part of the surplus product created in the community, and also a part of the product obtained by means of exchange. Private accumulation was also promoted by wars between the communities. Military commanders and tribal elders enriched themselves by seizing for their personal use the largest share of the war booty, including prisoners of war, who were turned into slaves.
Private property took shape in a situation of sharp struggle against the tradition of collective property and the egalitarian distribution of products, but the relations of production in the primitive society had already become an obstacle in the way of the further growth of the productive forces. It is not right to regard the origination of private property as some sort of "original sin" among primitive men, as the Utopian socialists, for instance, believed. In reality, private property and proprietary inequality were a natural result of the development of primitive-communal production. Engels says: "Wherever private property evolved it was the result of altered relations of production and exchange, in the interest of increased production and in furtherance of intercourse---hence as a result of economic causes.''^^1^^
Survivals of Primitive Relations in the Modern World
Survivals and relicts of the communal system will be found in the world' even today. They have assumed the form of the subsistence economy, tribal relations and the traditional power of the tribal chiefs, that is, tribalism.
When the imperialist powers ruled the colonies, they artificially preserved tribal relations and made use of the tribal elite for the most brutal exploitation of the bulk of the population in the dependent countries. With the rise to political independence, the former colonial countries strove at first to rely on the existing communal sector in order to
transform the economy, but it turned out that that was an unviable approach, which is why there is an increasingly negative attitude to tribalism in these countries.
Countries escaping from colonial oppression could benefit from the USSR's experience in overcoming the historically rooted backwardness of some parts of the country, where the socialist revolution found a patriarchal economy. Soviet experience demonstrates the need for making skilful use of tribal relations for the purpose of transforming them into socialist relations through the development of cooperative property.
The elaboration of the theory of economic development of the primitive-communal system by the classics of Marxism-Leninism is of intransient importance, for it provides the basis for a practical transformation of the survivals and relicts of primitive-communal relations in the modern world.
2. THE SLAVE-HOLDING MODE OF PRODUCTION
In the history of mankind, the slave-holding system was the first social mode of production based on exploitation of man by man and the antagonism of classes.
Emergence of the Slave-Holding Mode of Production
In the period of its disintegration, the tribal community contained within itself, alongside the freemen, some who were not free, namely, prisoners of war, who were made to work in the economy of the community.
The use of unfree men (slaves) as a work force is characteristic of the epoch of patriarchal slavery, a protracted epoch which is to be found in the history of many peoples, including those among which the slave-holding mode of production did not subsequently take shape.
The objective condition for society's transition to the slave-holding mode of production was the attainment of a new stage in the development of the productive forces as a result of the second great social division of labour, the separation of the handicrafts from agriculture, that led to an increase in material wealth, which was considerable by the standards of that period. The spread and consolidation of private property, the growth of proprietary inequality and the ap-
43~^^1^^ Frederick Engels, Anti-Diihring, p. 199,
42propriation of a part of the surplus product created by the community by persons enjoying a privileged status within it exerted a crucial influence on the development of social relations in that direction.
The separation of the handicrafts from agriculture led to an increase in the making of instruments of labour out of metal. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few families provided the necessary material conditions for the systematic and massive use of slave labour, which was becoming'the predominant type of labour, ousting the labour of freemen.
Exchange had a big part to play in the spread of private property, in proprietary differentiation and the consolidation of slavery. The development of exchange, now proceeding on the basis of private property, had as its direct outcome the conversion of slaves into commodity. Engels says: "Men had barely started to engage in exchange when they themselves were exchanged.''^^1^^
The proprietary inequality which prevailed in society, on the one hand, and the developing trade, especially trade in the prisoners-of-war-turned-slaves, on the other, created extensive possibilities for debt servitude. Not only prisoners of war, but also impoverished members of the tribe who fell into material dependence were turned into slaves.
The slave-holding mode of production marks the start of its history from the point at which the exploitation of slaves became the predominant form of production and when society itself was divided into antagonistic classes: slave-owners and slaves. Apart from these two classes, the slave-- holdingsociety also had freemen: urban handicraftsmen and small peasants, traders and usurers.
The establishment of slave-holding exploitation in society led to the emergence of the class state, and to the political domination of the class of slave-owners over the class of slaves.
Productive Forces in the Slave-Holding Society
Agriculture, cattle-breeding and the handicrafts were the chief branches of material production in the slave-holding society. At the initial period of its development, farming tech-
~^^1^^ Frederick Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 3, p. 331.
niques were extremely primitive, and mostly involved the use of wooden or stone implements. Later came metal implements of labour, first made of copper and bronze and then of iron. The most common implements in agriculture were the wooden plough, the harrow, the spade, the sickle, the pick and the pitchfork.
Handicraft production was initially carried on mainly by small and free commodity producers. Much later there arose large-scale handicraft shops, mines and other enterprises belonging to individual slave-owners or to the state, on which vast masses of slaves were exploited. The handicraftsmen gradually learned to make and use in their production the bellows, the potter's wheel, the wheel-barrow, a primitive type of loom, the millstone, the harnessed vehicle, etc.]
The development of the instruments of labour was paralleled by an improvement in men's labour skills. The specialities and trades of stonemason, carpenter, potter, saddler, metalworker and others appeared in the handicrafts. In agriculture, horticulture and viticulture were separated from crop-growing, while horse-breeding and sheep-breeding became separate branches.
Simple cooperation was the prevailing form in which slave labour was organised in all the branches. It differed from the cooperation of labour in the primitive society in that it was organised on a much larger scale and was based on the direct coercion of the labourers, the slaves. Grand testimonials of the cooperation of slave labour have come down to our day in the form of the Egyptian pyramids, the Roman theatres, canals and aqueducts, Greek and Indian temples and palaces, and so on.
Production Relations in the Slave-Holding Society
Land, forcibly seized either from the communities or from ruined free peasants, was an important part of the slaveowners' property. At different stages in the development of slave-holding society in various states, landed property appears in different concrete forms: communal, temple, state and individual private property. Landed property was of substantial importance only because the large landed proprietor had at his disposal subservient labourers, the slaves, who created a surplus product.
45 44in the slave-holding society, a specific feature of the conjunction of labour power with the means of production was that the labouring man, the slave, was not only deprived of any property in the means of production whatsoever, but was himself an object of the slave-owner's property like the material means of production.
The coercion to work involved the overt use of force. There was no question at all of offering the slave any personal material incentives for his labour.
The slave-owner had full disposal of the material goods produced by his slaves. A part of these was returned to the slave as the means of subsistence, as the necessary product ensuring the reproduction of his capacity for work. The other, rather substantial part went to satisfy the diverse requirements of the slave-owner and constituted the surplus product. That is why the slave's working time consisted of necessary and surplus time, and his labour of necessary and surplus labour.
A certain part of the surplus product produced by the slaves was ceded by the slave-owners to other exploiters, those who represented commercial and usury capital, who supplied them with luxuries or money. A sizable share of the surplus product went to the slave-holding state in the form of taxes, for it protected the interests of the ruling
class.
The slave-owning economy produced everything for its own use. It was essentially a natural economy. The conversion of some articles into commodities most frequently occurred whenever the need arose to acquire products not produced locally. As a rule, the slave-owners used the surplus product unproductively. A sizable mass of surplus product went into personal consumption and for servicing the members of the ruling class. It was expended on the erection of all kinds of architectural structures (temples, monuments, etc.), and also on religious rituals, games, spectacles, etc. In short, the slave-holding economy was confined to the task of meeting the "requirements of the stomach and the imagination" of the exploiters.
The purpose of slave-owning production was the satisfaction of the requirements of the slave-owners. This was done through the merciless exploitation of the slaves. That is, in effect, the substance of the basic economic law of the slave-holding society.
The Contradictions of the Slave-Owning System
The slave-holding mode of production was a progressive stage in social development, as compared with the primitivecommunal system. It ensured a higher stage in the organisation of labour, more extensive and ramified cooperation of labour, and some progress in production, which means a further development of the productive forces.
But the slave-holding mode of production was fraught with deep internal antagonistic contradictions, which doomed it to extinction.
The slave form of labour and the slave-holding form of property, the diametrically opposite condition of the slave and the slave-owner, and the antagonistic contradiction between the slave-owners and the slaves constitute the basic contradiction of the slave-holding society, which led to its inevitable downfall.
Alongside the basic contradiction of the slave-holding mode of production there were other related contradictions, namely, those between the large-scale production of the slave-owners and the small-scale economy of the free labourers, the contradiction between mental and manual labour, and that between town and country.
The slave system was a peculiar form of division of labour in the society into manual labour, performed by the slaves, and mental labour, done by the slave-owners. The negative aspect of the antithesis between mental and manual labour consisted in the fact that the slaves were expected to do no more than act as mechanical executors of someone else's will. They had no stake in the results of their labour, and this was a drag on the growth of the productive forces. Everywhere, slave labour was maintained by coercion.
One widely accepted view among bourgeois scholars is that not only dfd slavery involve coercion, but that the use of'force itself constituted the substance of slavery. Of course, slavery and slave labour are inconceivable without coercion, but coercion itself, as a means of forced labour, sprang from a definite level in the development of the productive forces, which means, from purely economic factors. The substance of slavery consists in the appropriation of the product of another's labour through the slave's extra-economic coercion.
In the slave-owning epoch, cities, together with the surrounding countryside, made up isolated slave-holding states,
47 46or poleis, as they did in Ancient Greece. But the cities were the centres of handicraft production, commerce and culture, where there was a relatively rapid growth of the population and of material wealth. The provinces surrounding these cities consisted of a countryside with backward forms of production and with many survivals of the primitive-- communal system. The cities exploited the countryside. The relations of exploitation produced the antithesis of town and country, the constant ravage and impoverishment of the countryside, and led to the practice of colonial policies by the slave-holding states.
One of the consequences of the slave-holding mode of production was the ruin and expulsion of the free small producers, the handicraftsmen and the peasants. Being free men with an economic stake in increasing the production of material wealth and directly involved in the process of production, they worked to improve the instruments of labour. But these toilers bore the brunt of the taxes levied for the maintenance of the state, and they provided the bulk of the soldiers for the slave-holding army, and this depleted
their economy.
Developing competition led to the mass expropriation of the free small proprietors. The same kind of goods produced on the slave-holding estates were, as a rule, offered at lower prices, for their costs of production were very much lower, because the maintenance of the slave required insignificant
outlays.
Other factors which led to the ruin and expulsion of the small proprietors were debt slavery and the outright seizure of peasant lands by slave-owners. The expropriation of the small-scale economy eventually led to the emergence of a great mass of impoverished citizens. Consequently, slavery, as the predominant form of labour, undermined the productive labour of the free population, thereby slowing down the development of the productive forces in the slave-holding society.
Role of Commercial and Usury Capital
Historically, the initial forms of capital---commercial and usury capital---first originated and developed on a relatively extensive scale within the entrails of the slave-owning society. The emergence of commercial capital marked the third
great social division of labour, the separation of the class of merchants.
The big merchants of the period of antiquity were above all slave-traders who followed in the wake of the invading armies conquering tribes and peoples, but they also traded in other commodities. As a result, the merchants received a sizable share of the surplus labour both of the free labourers and the slaves. The latter's exploitation was intensified. The developing trade had a direct influence on the intensive differentiation of the small-scale economy of the free peasants and handicraftsmen.
The development of usury capital, capital which yields an interest, is connected with the spreading circulation of commodities and money. By supplying the slave-owner with money, the usurer made him convert an ever greater part of his product into commodities and, consequently, to convert his estate into a commodity economy. Both the small-scale peasant and handicraft production, in which the producer was still the owner of the instruments of labour, also made use of enslaving loans. As a rule, usury capital ruined the small producers and turned them into slaves.
An important consequence of the development of commercial capital and usury in the slave-holding society was the conversion of land into a commodity and the emergence of mortgage debt, that is, the mortgaging of land by labouring people going to the wall.
Disintegration and Downfall of the Slave-Owning System
The limited and transient nature of the slave-holding mode of production was increasingly revealed in the unfolding of its irreconcilable contradictions. Slave-holding production could exist on the basis of predatory exploitation of an ever growing mass of slaves, but the sources from which the slaves were forthcoming began to dry up, and it was becoming obvious that slave labour was an extremely limited form of productive activity. Despite the overtly despotic form of coercion, the slaves' productivity declined. The slave-holding form of exploitation even ceased to ensure simple reproduction. With the decline in the slaves' productivity and the sharpening struggle between the exploited and the exploiters, the slave-holding estates became increasingly unprofitable. The worsening of conditions in agricul-
484---0245
49lural production was inevitably followed by a similar trend in handicraft production based on slave labour.
With the onset of the decline of the slave-holding economy in Rome from A. D. 2ncl-3rd centuries, the owners of the latifundia began to fragment their estates and to make these available for cultivation by slaves or free peasants who had lost their own land. The two groups constituted the mass of indentured labourers---the coloni---who were bound to work and to give up a sizable share of their product to the landowners. That was the colonatus system, the prototype of feudalism, the new system of production.
The slave-holding mode of production reached its highest development in the Roman state, which in the last centuries of its existence presented the most impressive picture of the final disintegration and downfall of the system.
The slave-holding mode of production went down once all its potentialities had been depleted, and its inherent contradictions sharpened to an extreme. The class struggle between the slaves and the slave-owners, between the toilers and the exploiters was a striking expression of the contradictions of the slave-holding society. The significance of the slave uprisings consisted in the fact that they were a manifestation of the protest against the slave relations, that they eroded the slave-holding mode of production and paved the way for a transition to more progressive social relations. Bourgeois scholars seek to present the slave-holding mode of production as the capitalism of the ancient world, and slavery as accidental. But in so doing they are merely trying to distort the uniformity of historical processes and to set up capitalism as an everlasting phenomenon.
3. THE FEUDAL MODE OF PRODUCTION
The feudal mode of production was a law-governed stage in the progressive development of the human society. The forms of transition to feudalism differed from country to country, being determined by different concrete historical
conditions.
With many peoples, elements of feudalism emerged in the entrails of the slave-holding mode of production, subsequently to become the predominant form of production relations. But not all the peoples reached feudalism via the slave-own-
50ing system. Some of them went on to feudalism directly from the primitive-communal system, bypassing the slave-owning system. The specific features of this origination of feudalism were clearly seen in Rus and some other Slavic countries.
While the peoples may have advanced to feudalism along different roads, the main content of the process was similar: the rise of the class of feudal lords---the owners of the land--- and the class of dependent and exploited peasants, who had no land, and who worked small farms on the land belonging to the feudal lords to which they were tied down and from which they had to give up a share of their produce through extra-economic coercion.
An analysis of the feudal mode of production is contained in the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism, and is concentrated in Chapter XLVII of Volume III of Marx's Capital.
The Productive Forces of Feudalism
Agriculture was of crucial importance in the economy under feudalism. Land was the basic means of production. At the early stages of feudalism, the two-field system prevailed in agriculture, with the fallow-field system of cultivation widespread in some places. The three-field system was established as time went on, while the gradual introduction of the iron plough, the harrow and other metal farming implements helped to raise the level of agricultural techniques. Wind mills and subsequently water mills were a characteristic attribute of the feudal economy and one of its technical achievements.
In the period of feudalism, there was a further development of market-gardening, grass farming, vine-growing and other branches of agriculture. Because of the agrarian character of the economy and the military needs of the feudal lords, ever greater importance was attached to animal breeding, especially horse-breeding.
The improvement of agricultural implements and of the methods of smelting and treatment of metals helped to revive the handicrafts, which had declined during the disintegration of the slave-holding system. The development of the handicrafts led to a deepening of the social division of labour and to the rise of the feudal cities and promoted the development of feudal society's productive forces. However, the changes in hardware and technology were slow. Feudal
4*
51
production 011 the whole was based on the manual labour of peasants and artisans. The relations of production in the feudal society corresponded to the character and level of the development of the productive forces.
Feudal Property in Land and Peasant Land-Tenure
The feudal form of property differed from the slave-- holding form in that under feudalism not all the means of production were separated from the working people. This gave the peasant an interest in the results of his work and was, for that reason, another stage in social progress.
Land, the basic means of production, did not belong to those who tilled it, but was owned by the lay and clerical feudal lords. The economic substance of the feudal property in the means of production is that the actual producers, the peasants, own no land, that is, the basic means of agri-/ cultural production. They received land from the feudal lords not to own but to use, and in return had to perform various feudal services. Consequently, the feudal lords' property in land was the economic basis for their exploitation of the peasants. Formally the peasant could be driven off his allotment at a moment's notice. But that was an exception; the rule was, on the contrary, that the peasant was tied to the land. The peasants' allotments were a means of ensuring the feudal lords with a free labour force. The peasants' land-tenure in the form of allotments was, as a rule, hereditary.
In the European countries, there was a strict legal hierarchy among the feudal lords with respect to the feudal property in land. Indeed, the term ``feudalism'' itself derives from the feud or fief, the characteristic form of landed property in that period, being a landed benefice held by a vassal in fee from his seigneur, or superior feudal lord, contingent on the performance of definite services.
The social system which is based on landed property in the form of a feud is known as feudalism.
Toilers' Property and Extra-Economic Coercion
Alongside the property of the feudal lords there was also the personal property of the peasants and handicraftsmen, the people who produced the goods. The peasant, for instance,
]iad in his property farming implements, draught and productive cattle, poultry, fodder, seeds for sowing, farm buildings, a dwelling house, household utensils, etc. The urban artisans also possessed definite means of production. A fundamental feature of the property of the small producers, peasants and handicraftsmen was that it was based on their personal labour and was not exploitive.
The feudal monopoly of land, the key means of production, made the peasants economically dependent on the lord. But feudalism also practised extra-economic coercion, without which feudal production would have been impossible. Lenin says: "If the landlord had not possessed direct power over the person of the peasant, he could not have compelled a man who had a plot of land and ran his own farm to work for him. Hence, 'other than economic pressure', as Marx says in describing this economic regime, was necessary... The form and degree of this coercion may be the most varied, ranging from the peasant's serf status to his lack of rights, in the social estates.''^^1^^ The peasants were tied to the land, and the feudal lord frequently also had the right to sell them.
The Natural Economy
The predominance of natural economy was an essential feature of the feudal economy. The needs of the feudal lord, his family and the host of retainers were met by the products supplied by the lord's estate or by the indentured peasants. On the feudal estate, the handicrafts were supplementary to farming. In this way, the feudal lords obtained the diverse products they needed, and solved the problems of reproduction on a natural economy basis. Only a few vital products, like salt, ironware and luxuries, were usually supplied by merchants. The peasants' was a natural economy, and they engaged not only in farming but also in the processing of the raw materials they produced, spinning, weaving, making footwear, various implements, etc.
The natural economy prodominnnted under feudalism because of the relatively low lovel in the development of the productive forces and the social division of labour.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Development of Capitalism in Russia", Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 193.
53The Substance and Forms of Feudal Exploitation
In the feudal society, the indentured peasant reproduced his labour power by means of the product which he obtained on his allotment. Consequently, the feudal lord imposed on the peasant himself the concern for the reproduction of
labour power.
The surplus product created by the surplus labour of the direct producers was appropriated by the feudal lord in the form of feudal land rent, which was the economic form of realisation of the feudal lords' property in land. Feudal land rent included the whole of the surplus product, and frequently also a part of the necessary product created by the peasant. Thus, the basic economic law of feudalism consists in the production of the surplus product, which is created through the exploitation of indentured peasants and appropriated by the feudal lord in the form of feudal land rent.
As the feudal mode of production developed, there was also a change in the form of land rent. The initial form of feudal land rent was labour rent, known as corvee. The peasant produced the necessary product on his farm, and the surplus product on the lord's estate. With the labour rent, the surplus labour is separated from the necessary labour both in time and space. A part of the week---three days and more---the peasant worked on the lord's estate, and the rest of the week, on his own farm. He tilled the lord's land with his own implements and draught animals, and performed building and other works. Quite naturally, the peasant had no incentive to increase labour productivity on the lord's estate. That is why, the peasant's surplus labour assumed the form of coercive labour for the feudal lord and was done under direct supervision by the landed proprietor or his representative, the supervisor. Here, we find direct extra-economic coercion of the peasant. He had an incentive to increase his productivity only on his own farm, because it was the source of his own subsistence.
The second form of feudal rent is rent in kind (quit-rent). In most instances, it was combined with the initial form of rent, labour rent.
Under this form of rent, the bulk of the feudal lord's land was allotted to the peasants. Rent in kind differed from labour rent in that the surplus labour was not performed by the peasant as a separate or special kind of labour on his
master's estate, but together with the necessary labour on his own farm. The indentured peasant gave up to the feudal lord a part of his products, either raw or processed, in the form of quit-rent. He did not work under the supervision of the landed proprietor or his representative, but on his own, and disposed of all his working time.
The rent in kind (quit-rent) system of economy enabled the peasants to toil for their own benefit over and above all the feudal services and gave them an interest in the results of their work, and so an incentive to improve their farming.
The third form of feudal rent was money rent. This is a converted form of rent in kind. The difference between money rent and rent in kind is that the peasant gave up the surplus product to the feudal lord not in kind but in cash. It was no longer sufficient for the peasant to produce the surplus product on his farm, for he also had to sell it to convert it into cash. Rent in kind was converted into money rent because of the development of the division of labour, the further separation of the handicrafts from agriculture, and the development of commodity-money relations.
Money rent was the final form of feudal land rent. It marked the period of the disintegration of feudalism and the gradual development of the capitalist structure within its womb. Relations between the feudal lord and the indentured peasant were increasingly transformed into contractual and quit-rent and money-rent relations. The status of the indentured peasant was becoming akin to the status of the ordinary tenant. This meant that the peasant was in a position to buy out his quit-rent obligation and to become an independent peasant with full ownership of the land he cultivated. Land was beginning to enter into commerce and was being bought and sold. Plots of land could now be bought not only by those who had once been quit-rent peasants, but also by urban dwellers. The development of commodity-money relations deepened the differentiation of the peasantry: alongside the independent peasants who had bought their way to freedom were others---ruined peasants---who had to work for a wage.
The transition from one form of rent to another, being a reflection of the growth of the productive forces, proceeded in clashes and struggles between the peasants and the feudal lords, so deepening the antagonistic character of the production relations in the feudal society.
54 55Handicrafts and Commerce
The system of production relations under feudalism includes not only the relations between the peasants and the feudal lords, but also the economic relations taking shape in the process of handicraft production in the towns.
There, handicraft production had a peculiar structure. The artisans were united in guilds. In order to adapt themselves to the requirements of a limited local market, and also to prevent competition between master craftsmen and their proprietary differentiation, the guild stringently regulated the technology and volume of production. The guild structure of the handicrafts, as a rule, made possible to effect only simple reproduction, that is, production on the same scale. Handicraft production was manual and small. The master craftsman's higher status with respect to the apprentices was determined not so much by property in the means of production, as by his professional skills. There was virtually no division of labour in the workshop. In those conditions, it took a long time to become a master craftsman, and this put a high value on craftsmanship.
The purpose of the master craftsman's economic activity was the attainment of a standard of existence which was ``appropriate'' to the status established by his guild rather than the making of money and enrichment. At the early stage in the development of the urban handicrafts, relations between the master craftsman and his subordinates were mainly patriarchal, although the apprentices were already being exploited. With the development of commodity-money relations, the gap between the proprietary and production status of the guild master craftsman, on the one hand, and the apprentices, on the other, tended to grow: the former grew rich through the exploitation of the latter. The contradictions between the master craftsman and the apprentices developed into irreconcilable and antagonistic ones.
In the feudal epoch, the towns were the centres not only of the handicrafts but also of commerce. Merchants and usurers made up the richest part of the urban population. The merchants were organised in merchant guilds.
Merchants' or commercial capital under feudalism operated as the medium in the exchange of the surplus product, appropriated by the feudal lords, for luxuries and other rare
56/onsumer articles, and also in the exchange of the products of feudal peasants and the guild handicraftsmen.
The deepening of the social division of labour and the growth of the productive forces gradually transferred the leading role in the development of the productive forces from the agricultural countryside to the handicraft and commercial cities.
A specific feature of the relations taking shape between town and countryside under feudalism was that, politically, the countryside dominated the town, because the state power was wielded by the landowners, while the town engaged in the economic exploitation of the countryside. Marx says: "If the countryside exploits the town politically in the Middle Ages, wherever feudalism has not been broken down by exceptional urban development---as in Italy, the town, on the other hand, exploits the land economically everywhere and without exception, through its monopoly prices, its system of taxation, its guild organisation, its direct commercial fraudulence and its usury.''^^1^^
Further Development of the Productive Forces under Feudalism
The advantages of the economic system of feudalism over the slave-owning system gave rise to new and higher level productive forces. In agriculture, extensive use was made of iron implements of labour. The development of farming implements raised the agro-technical level of agriculture. New branches of cropping emerged. The importance of animal husbandry increased.
Handicraft production also underwent substantial changes.
The improvement of smelting and the treatment of metals was of primary importance in perfecting the instruments of labour. The simplest wire-drawing and rolling mills for the production of wire and sheet iron were made. Lathes, grinders and screw-cutters, even if highly primitive ones, were already being used in the 15th century. The first drilling tools, driven by water-wheels, were developed. The overshot water-wheel was used as a source of energy in mining and sawing, and in paper and gun-powder making. Building was being developed.
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Capital, Voiv III, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p. 801.
57Some technical changes also occurred in textile production. There was ever wider use of looms, and in the 14th and 15th centuries came the switch to horizontal looms. The mechanical drawboy loom was invented in 1600. At the end of the 16th century, the spinning wheel came into wide use. Warping drums and fulling mills were used in cloth-making. The important technical advances made in the feudal epoch are evidenced by the invention of the clock, paper, and printing. The invention of the mariner's compass helped further to develop shipping and navigation. There appeared a new type of sea-going ship, the caravella, which was fast and manoeuvrable.
Progress in production techniques and the rising standard of professional skills among the working people testified to a growth of the productive forces in the feudal society. But the development of production was also hemmed in by the narrow framework of the feudal relations of production. The discrepancy between the growing productive forces and the backward relations of production objectively led to a sharpening of all the contradictions of feudalism: those between the peasants and the feudal lords; between the working people (peasants and handicraftsmen) and the bourgeoisie originating within the entrails of feudalism, on the one hand, and the feudal lords and the feudal system, on the other; between town and country; between mental and manual labour; and between the subsistence character of feudal production and the growing commodity economy.
Disintegration of Feudalism
The part of the products turned out by the handicraftsmen and peasants for the purposes of exchange constituted the production of commodities. The simple commodity economy of the handicraftsmen and peasants provided, within the system of feudalism, the basis for the growth of capitalist relations of production. The development of the productive forces in agricultural and handicraft production, the deepening of the social division of labour between town and country intensified the market ties between the individual economic units and led to the formation of local markets, while the lively economic ties between the economic regions and towns led to the creation of a national market.
Various commodity producers spent different quantities
58of time for making the same kind of commodities. Those whose labour inputs were higher, because of worse conditions of production, recouped these in the sale of their commodities only partially and so eventually went to the wall. The others were enriched because of the better conditions of their labour and the appropriation of the product of the labour of others. The continued development of commoditymoney relations accelerated the economic stratification of the commodity producers: on the one hand, there was a mass of people deprived of the means of production and the means of subsistence, and on the other, a handful of rich men.
The expansion of the market beyond the national frontiers was highly important for the origination of the capitalist economic order. A tremendous demand for goods came from the emerging world market. Meanwhile, the guild handicrafts turned these out in limited quantities. The guild system, with its isolation, routine and stringent regulation of techniques and the volume of production acted as a constraint on society's economic development. That being so, some master craftsmen began, in defiance of the guild charter, to expand production, and to increase the number of workers in their workshops and the length of the working day. Some craftsmen transferred production to the countryside, where there was no guild control, and handed out orders to their apprentices to work on at home. The monopoly status of the guild was being undermined. The richest master craftsmen became capitalists by exploiting wage workers, and the indigent mass of apprentices became proletarians deprived of any means of production and were forced to sell their labour power as a commodity.
Commercial capital, which grew together with the development of commodity-money relations, had a big part to play in the origination of capitalist economic forms. Its role was of a dual nature. On the one hand, the merchant could . subordinate the small commodity producer (handicraftsman or peasant) and make him work for his profit. In that case, he did not introduce any technical or organisational innovations into production, but merely converted the small commodity producer into an actual wage worker, while leavinghim outwardly independent. On the other hand, the commodity producer himself now and again became an industrial capitalist and merchant.
The disintegration of feudal and the origination of cap-
59italist relations proceeded both in town and country. Engels says: "Long before the walls of the knightly castles were breached by the shot of the new cannon, their foundations were undermined by money. In fact, gun-powder was, one could say, merely the bailiff of money.''^^1^^
The feudal lord's economy was being increasingly drawn into commerce and fell under the power of money. While the amount of corvee and quit-rent was limited by the requirements of the feudal lord and his retainers, the money form of rent went to increase the peasants' services. They were now constantly in need of money, and their exploitation was further increased by the merchants through non-- equivalent exchange and by the usurers through enslaving loans. The development of commodity-money relations accelerated the differentiation and stratification of the peasantry into social groups. Whereas a majority of the peasants fell into poverty, were forced to do back-breaking toil and were ruined, there was a growth in the number of village kulaks, the rich peasants who bought their freedom from the feudal lord and, in their turn, became exploiters of the poor peasants.
The origination of the capitalist mode of production was accelerated by the most brutal use of force on the part of the bourgeoisified landlords, the urban bourgeoisie and the state power. Force, says Marx, is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.
So-called Primitive Accumulation of Capital
The forcible separation of the direct producers from the means of production and the concentration of the latter in the hands of a few, the conversion of these means of production into capital, such is the content of the primitive accumulation of capital. It is so called because it was a process creating the necessary conditions for the origination of the capitalist mode of production. A comprehensive analysis of. the process will be found in Chapter XXIVof Volume I of Marx's Capital.
The process of primitive accumulation first began in Britain in the final third of the 15th century and went on until the end of the 18th century. The flourishing of cloth
~^^1^^ F. Engels, "Ober der Verfall des Feudalismus und das Aufkommen der Bourgeoisie", in: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Vol. 21, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1962, p. 394.
60manufactories caused the development of pasture sheepbreeding. Accordingly, the landlords drove the peasants off their lands and ``enclosed'' these. This overt plunder of the peasants was sanctioned by the state which passed "enclosure acts" for the benefit of the rising bourgeoisie. The forcible expropriation of peasant lands by the bourgeoisified landlords led to the emergence of a class of people who were free from feudal dependence but who were deprived of the means of production and the means of subsistence. The extensive expropriation of the peasantry in Britain was also connected with the confiscation of monastery lands and the expulsion of peasants from these. The culminating stage in the forcible creation of a class of proletarians was the so-called "clearing of the estates" of the farm labourers who lived on their territory and who were now deprived of hearth and home. This was done as early as the beginning of the 19th century. The robbed and ruined masses of people had nothing but their own labour power. Such is one aspect of the primitive accumulation of capital.
The other is the concentration in the hands of "a few of vast fortunes in the form of money, which they used to set up capitalist enterprises. Here, an important part belonged to the money accumulated by merchants, usurers and artisans grown rich. An important source for the accumulation of wealth by the emergent bourgeoisie was its predatory plunder of the colonial peoples, non-equivalent trade, piracy and the highly lucrative trade in Negro slaves. The formation of fortunes was accelerated by the policy of protectionism and other methods.
With some specific features, the primitive accumulation of capital was a process that was also under way in other countries, including Russia.
The transition from feudalism to capitalism was effected by means of bourgeois revolutions, in which the peasants and artisans were the chief revolutionary force. The bourgeois revolutions led to the collapse of the feudal system arid the domination of capitalism.
Survivals of Feudalism Today
Even today, survivals of feudalism will be found in many countries of the capitalist world, above all in agriculture. They are especially widespread in the economically less
01developed and dependent countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These survivals of feudal relations hamper the developing countries' progress and the struggle for national revival and economic independence. Because feudal oppression in these countries is closely interwoven with imperialist oppression, the peoples' struggle in the economically less developed countries against the feudal order tends to merge with the struggle against imperialism, and for an end to exploitation.
Bourgeois ideologists distort the substance of feudalism. They insist on regarding some of its superficial and inessential features as the characteristic ones, like the nominal holding of land, the subordination of people to their seigneur instead of the king, the hierarchy of vassals and the political fragmentation. But they deliberately discover in the Middle Ages so many ``embryos'' and ``beginnings'' of capitalism, that feudalism begins to look like capitalism. That is yet another futile attempt to prove that capitalism is everlasting. In actual fact, capitalism began to germinate in Europe only in the period of the disintegration of feudalism, beginning from the late 15th century and early 16th century (only with a few exceptions in the 14th and 15th centuries) in the form of the capitalist cottage industry, capitalist cooperation and manufacture.
PART ONE
THE CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
Section 1
THE GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF THE CAPITALIST MODE OF PRODUCTION
Capitalism is a socio-economic system based on the further development of private property under a new level of development of the productive forces, which is higher than the one under feudalism. The bulk of the people under capitalism are deprived of the means of production and are exploited as wage workers by those who own the means of production. The truly scientific explanation of the substance of capitalist relations was given by Marx in his Capital. Lenin described Capital as the greatest politico-economic work and also as the chief and basic work containing an exposition of scientific socialism. Engels says this about Capital: "As long as there have been capitalists and workers on earth no book has appeared which is of as much importance for the workers as the one before us.''^^1^^
Marx set himself the task of understanding the law of motion, the basic law governing the development of the capitalist mode of production. By means of the method of materialist dialectics, Marx gave scientific proof that capitalism was historically transient, that it was bound to disappear, to be replaced by the communist mode of production resulting from a proletarian revolution. He also established the epochal role of the working class as the grave-digger of capitalism and the creator of a new and more progressive mode of production.
Marx's Capital consists of four volumes.^^2^^ Volume I contains an analysis of capitalist production, Volume II, cap-
~^^1^^ Frederick Engels, "Marx's Capital", in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in three volumes, Vol. 2, p. 146.
~^^2^^ Volume I was first published in German in 1867, and volumes II and III were prepared for the press after Marx's death by Engels, respectively, in 1885 and 1894. The material of Volume IV was first published scientifically in the USSR in 1954-1961.
63italist circulation, and Volume 111, production and circulation as a unity; Volume IV deals with the history of the origination of the theory of surplus value.
In Volume 1, Marx begins his analysis of the economic relations of capitalism with the commodity, because in the capitalist society the production of products as commodities is predominant. Having discovered the dual nature of labour which produces commodities and the substance of the value of commodities, Marx goes on to an examination of the form of value and money. He goes on to show how, at a definite stage in historical development, money was converted into capital. Marx discovered surplus value and so showed the source from which all the exploiter classes derived their incomes under capitalism. For the first time in the history of economic science, he laid bare the substance of capitalist exploitation and showed that with the development of the productive forces of capitalism the exploitation of the working people was bound to be intensified.
Marx's analysis of the accumulation of capital was new and highly important. He showed the actual causes behind the growth of unemployment in the midst of the capitalists' growing wealth. Volume I ends with an analysis of the historical trend in capitalist accumulation, and scientific proof that the socialist revolution is inevitable. Lenin showed that Marx had given a model of scientific analysis of socio-- economic formation.
Capital is a powerful weapon of the working class in the fight against the anti-communist ideology. Lenin described it as a specimen of inexorable objectivity in scientific research, adding that "rarely will you find in a scientific work so much `feeling', so much heated and passionate polemical attacks on representatives of backward views, on representatives of the social classes which, in the author's convinced opinion, are hampering social development".^^1^^
It was Lenin who analysed the highest and final stage in the development of capitalism---imperialism---in his work entitled Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, and other works. The specific features of the present stage in the development of capitalism are described in the documents of the Marxist-Leninist parties.
Chapter three COMMODITY PRODUCTION, COMMODITIES AND MONEY
1. THE UNIVERSAL NATURE OF COMMODITY PRODUCTION UNDER CAPITALISM
By commodity production, says Lenin, is meant an economic system "in which goods are produced by separate, isolated producers, each specialising in the making of some one product, so that to satisfy the needs of society it is necessary to buy and sell products (which, therefore, become commodities) in the market".^^1^^
Under capitalism, the production of commodities has become universal. It is not only the thing produced by hand, but also man's own labour power that becomes a commodity. The purchase and sale of labour power was the starting point for the process which converted private property commodity production into the dominant form of economic relations.
Capitalist commodity production differs essentially from commodity production in precapitalist formations. Typical for the latter was simple commodity production. The simple commodity producers---small owners of property---apply their personally owned means of production. They own the product of their labour. Production is effected by means of personal labour for the purpose of satisfying the producer's personal requirements. At the capitalist enterprise, the means of production belong to the capitalists, while the workers are deprived of the means of production. The capitalist exploits wage labour and gratuitously appropriates a sizable part of the product of the labour of others. The capitalist uses the joint work of many workers under his command for the purpose of obtaining profit.
Consequently, there are essential distinctions between simple and capitalist commodity production. But they are
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "The Heritage We Renounce", Collected Works, Vol. 2, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1963, p. 531.
~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, "On the So-Called Market Question", Collected, Works, Vol. 1, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1960, p. 93.
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65intrinsically of the same kind, because both are based on private property in the means of production. With the domination of private property, simple commodity production constantly generates capitalist relations. The problems considered in this chapter were analysed by Marx in Chapters I-III of Volume I of his Capital.
The social labour embodied in a commodity constitutes the value of that commodity. Value is the labour condensed in the commodity. The- whole of social life is based on labour. In exchanging commodities, commodity producers must reckon with this objective fact. When exchanging freely reproducible commodities, they must, in their own interests, proceed from their labour equivalence, from their value. The exchange value of commodities, that is, the proportion in which one commodity is exchanged for another, is determined by their value. Exchange value is the form of value, its expression in the act of exchange.
Only a thing that is a use value can have value. Not all useful things, not each use value, however, has value: there is no value in things to which no human labour has been applied (for instance, uncultivated land, the water of rivers and seas, wild plants, etc.). But the outlay of labour does not of itself turn a product into a value. A product of labour has value only in definite social conditions, in the presence of commodity production. Value is a historical category.
The Dual Character of Labour Embodied in Commodities. Private and Social Labour
The commodity producer's labour has a dual character. On the one hand, it is useful labour creating the things that satisfy men's various requirements. Some kind of useful labour is an everlasting and natural necessity in human existence, regardless of social conditions. On the other hand, the labour of each commodity producer is a particle of the whole of social labour, an expenditure of human labour power generally, irrespective of its concrete forms. The former type of labour is called concrete labour, and the latter, abstract labour. Concrete labour is that which is expended in a definite useful form and creates a definite use value (coal, metal, corn, etc.). The specific features of the concrete labour of each commodity producer inevitably spring from the distinctions in the objects of labour, the instruments of labour, the character of production operations, and the end result of labour. Use value results from the conjunction of some nature's substance and labour.
But whatever the type of concrete labour we consider, it is an expenditure of human energy (muscles, brain, nerves), a particle of the aggregate outlays of general human social
5*
f!7
2. THE COMMODITY AND ITS PROPERTIES
The commodity is a product of labour designed for exchange through purchase and sale. The commodity has two properties: first, it satisfies some human requirement, and second, it is a thing capable of being exchanged for another. In other words, the commodity has use value and exchange value.
The Two Factors of Commodities
' The use value of a thing consists in the fact that it satisfies some human need either as an article of personal consumption, or as a means of production. The material wealth of a society consists of use values. Under commodity production, the use value does not satisfy the producer's own needs, but of those who buy the given commodity. So, the production of commodities is a process which must lead to the creation of social use value. Because commodities have the property of being exchanged for other commodities, the historical peculiarity of the use value of the commodity consists in the fact that it is the vehicle of exchange value.
Exchange value is the capacity of a commodity of being exchanged in a definite proportion for other commodities. Although in individual acts of exchange these proportions may be accidental, on the whole they spring from definite uniformities. The labour theory of value sums up the experience in the development of exchange over the centuries.
Commodities exchanged for each other as use values differ from each other, for otherwise the exchange would be meaningless. The common and objective property of commodities which makes it possible to regard them as equivalents is that social labour has been expended on their production. As use values, commodities are different, but as the embodiment of social labour they are homogeneous.
66labour. The social labour of commodity producers, labour generally, irrespective of its concrete form, is abstract labour. It is a characteristic feature of commodity production. It expresses the relations among the commodity producers and is, for that reason, a historical category. Even in the natural economy, there was something common to the labour of all men, but this common feature of labour was manifested directly, and not through an equation of things in the process of exchange.
When private property led to the separation of the producers, each of them began to engage in a definite type of labour as a private pursuit. Labour ceased to be immediate social labour, and its social nature was obscured. The exchange of commodities alone establishes the fact that the labour of a given producer is required by society, that it is a particle of social labour. The expenditure of social labour by the commodity producers under private property is calculated spontaneously, through exchange.
So, abstract labour is general human labour, whose social character is expressed in the process of commodity exchange; it is labour that creates value.
Value is abstract labour crystallised in a commodity. Abstract labour expresses definite relations of production, the relations among commodity producers. This means that value is not the property of a thing either, but an expression of the relations of production among commodity producers.
It was Marx who discovered the dual character of labour producing commodities, and this discovery was of exceptional importance for the scientific elaboration of the political economy of capitalism, because it helped to formulate a truly scientific labour theory of value, to show the contradictions of the commodity economy, and then the contradictions of capitalist production, the laws governing its development, and its inevitable decline.
Commodity producers are divided by private property, but the social division of labour invests labour with a social character and connects the independent private commodity producers with each other. The result is the emergence and development of a deep-seated contradiction between private and social labour. Private property inevitably brings about a haphazard development of commodity production, and engenders competition among commodity producers. The social character of these producers' labour and their depen-
dence on each other is manifested only on the market, in the spontaneous exchange of commodities and in market competition.
The contradiction between private and social labour is antagonistic and is the basic contradiction of simple commodity production. It is expressed in the fact that in the process of competition, some commodity producers are enriched, while others are ruined and perish. Under the capitalist mode of production, this contradiction tends to sharpen and develop into a contradiction between the social character of production and the private capitalist form of appropriation. This will be considered below.
The Magnitude of the Value of a Commodity
The magnitude of the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour that is socially necessary for its production, and it is measured by labour time. Different commodity producers expend different quantities of time for the making of the same type of commodity, and as a result of this commodities have different individual values. But because value embodies social labour, the magnitude of the social value cannot be determined by the individual expenditure of labour. The social value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary time required for its production. Socially necessary labour time is the time expended on the making of a commodity under the given socially normal conditions of production with an average level of skill and intensity of labour in the given society.
The magnitude of the value of commodities tends to change depending on labour productivity, which is determined by the quantity of products turned out in a unit of labour time.
Labour productivity depends on a number of factors, above all, on the level in the development of the instruments of labour and their efficiency. Of tremendous importance is the level of the worker's skill, the level in the development of science and technology, and the application of their achievements in production, the extent to which production is concentrated, and natural conditions.
Labour productivity refers to concrete labour because it is expressed in greater or lesser quantities of the use value turned out in a unitj of labour time. Concrete labour, says Marx, may be a richer or scarcer source of product. But ab-
69 68stract labour (of the same complexity and intensity) turns out one and the same value in a unit of time. That is why the magnitude of the value of a commodity tends to change in direct proportion to the labour expended on it, and in inverse proportion to its productive power.
Labour may be more intensive or less. By intensity of labour is meant the expenditure of labour power per unit of time. In an equal period of time, more intense labour creates a greater value than less intense labour.
Labour producing commodities is called simple labour, if it does not require special training, and complex labour, if it does. Simple labour is unskilled, and complex labour is skilled. Every complex labour is, in effect, multiplied simple labour.
3. THE FORM OF VALUE. THE EMERGENCE OF MONEY
Value is the social property of a thing. It is impossible directly to discover value in a commodity by means of some physical or chemical analysis. It is manifested only in the relations among commodity producers, when a given commodity is equated to other commodities in the process of exchange, that is, through exchange value.
Development of the Form of Value
The most elementary form of value is the simple (or accidental) form of value, and it is an expression of the value of one commodity in terms of another. For instance:
1 axe = 1 sheep.
In this equation, one commodity (the axe) expresses its value in terms of another commodity (the sheep). The latter commodity (the sheep) is an expression of the value of the former commodity (the axe), and serves as the material for expressing its value. The commodity expressing its value in another commodity is in the relative form of value. The commodity which expresses the value of another commodity is in the equivalent form of value, is its equivalent.
The simple (or accidental) form of value relates to the time in which exchange originated, a time in which exchange was accidental. At that stage, the role of equivalent was
not fixed in some single commodity and was performed by different commodities.
The development of the social division of labour and the continued growth of production made for the development of exchange. Ever greater quantities of product were involved in the process of exchange. It became more regular. As a result of the first great social division of labour (the separation of cattle-breeding from agriculture), cattle was no longer accidentally, but systematically exchanged for other commodities. The other commodities (corn, axes, etc.) came to be related to cattle not as accidental, but as special equivalents. Each of them came to be one of many equivalents to which cattle was equated. Exchange assumed the following form:
1 sheep = 4 sacks of corn, or = 1 axe, or = etc.
This form of exchange, expressive of a new stage in its development, is known as the total or expanded form of value. It characterises the expansion and consolidation of production ties. In these conditions, the exactness of the quantitative proportions between commodities tends to grow in importance, because exchange comes to play an ever greater part in the recoupment of the labour expended on their production.
The further growth of commodity production and exchange and the deepening of the social division of labour result in the singling out from the commodity world of one commodity which becomes the equivalent for all the other commodities, the universal equivalent. The expanded form of value is gradually transformed into the universal form of value:
4 sacks of corn = i
1 axe
= \ i sheep.
etc.
J
At the preceding stages in the development of exchange, any commodity could perform the function of equivalent. Now, the value of all the commodities is expressed only in one commodity, which operates as the immediate embodiment of social labour. Any commodity can be obtained for the commodity which plays the role of universal equivalent.
The need for a universal equivalent is due to the fact that, at a definite stage in the development of the productive
70 71forces, exchange became regular and acquired vital importance.
The universal equivalent appeared as a result of the spontaneous process in the development of exchange. The role of universal equivalent fell to that product which operated as a commodity par excellence, that is, a commodity that was produced mainly for exchange. The function of universal equivalent in the various concrete conditions of production was performed by different commodities: cattle, the skins of wild animals, fish, shells, etc. When exchange expanded and spilled over the limits of the local market,.there arose the need for fixing this function in one commodity, and this commodity became money. Consequently, money is the consummate form of universal equivalent, a special commodity whose use value is closely knit with the equivalent form of value.
As production developed, the role of money was gradually fastened on gold.
This is not due to any supernatural properties that gold may have, but to the fact that the properties of precious metals generally (homogeneity, divisibility, durability) make them most suitable for the social role of money, while gold, in addition, contains a large quantity of social labour in a small unit of weight. Gold assumed the function of money later than other metals, because it required a large quantity of labour, and society had to become sufficiently rich to use it as money.
definite social relations among men. The circulation of money is not a technical but a social process.
Under capitalism, money becomes the universal instrument of capitalist exploitation, the means for the purchase of wage labour and for the gratuitous appropriation of a part of the labour of others. But in itself money is not capital. It becomes capital only when it is used for exploitation of man by man.
The Functions of Money. Money as a Standard of Value
'The substance of money is expressed in the functions which it performs in the process of commodity production and circulation.
The first function of money is to operate as a standard of value. The value of various commodities is commensurable, which means that it can be compared in terms of quantity. The contradictions of the social labour embodied in a commodity make it impossible to express value directly in terms of labour time. It is expressed in terms of money. But it is not money that makes commodities commensurable, but the fact that all of them, including gold, are the product of social labour. The value of commodities is measured in terms of gold precisely because social labour has been expended both on the commodities and on gold.
In order to express, or measure, the value of a commodity there is no need to have ready money---gold. Money performs the function of standard of value as ideal money, as a mental image. The value of a commodity expressed in terms of money is the price of that commodity. The price of a commodity signifies the equivalence of the value of a definite mass of gold and the value of a definite quantity of the commodity. The price corresponds to the value of the commodity only when supply coincides with dem&nd. Otherwise, price inevitably departs from value. Consequently, the prices of commodities depend on the value of these commodities, on the value of money (gold), and on the correlation between supply and demand.
The prices of commodities are expressed in a definite quantity of the money commodity, gold. The quantity, the mass of gold is measured by its weight. A definite weight quantity of gold is taken as the unit for the measurement of its mass. This unit, established by the state as the unit
4. THE SUBSTANCE OF MONEY AND ITS FUNCTION The Substance and Role of Money
Money is a commodity which has a special role to play as universal equivalent. Only through exchange for money is it possible to establish that commodities are, in effect, the products of social labour. In other words, money is that medium in the market-place which helps to take stock of social labour in terms of quantity and quality. Under private property, this stock-taking is effected spontaneously, behind the backs of the commodity producers.
Bourgeois economists regard money as a technical means of exchange. But the fact is that money is an expression of
72 73of money, is called the standard of price. This serves for measuring the mass of gold. All the prices of commodities are expressed as a definite quantity of money units or, in other words, as a definite quantity of the weight units of gold.
Money as the Medium of Circulation
In the circulation of commodities, money must be readily available because the ideal prices of commodities must be converted into real money. In that event, money performs the function of the medium of circulation. The process of circulation can be expressed by the formula C---M---C, consisting of two acts: C---M and M---C (the conversion of commodity into money and of money into commodity). The conversion of commodity into money signifies social recognition of the fact that the labour expended by the commodity producer on the making of the commodity is required by society.
Commodity-money circulation contains within itself the possibility of the acts of purchase and sale of commodities being disrupted, and the possibility of economic crises of overproduction.
As a medium of circulation, money initially appeared in the form of ingots. But the exchange of commodities for ingots produced some difficulties, and there arose the need for an authoritative authentication of the content of metal in an ingot. It is the coin that is the established form of ingot containing a known quantity of metal in terms of weight and purity, and this is certified by a special state stamp.
Money's performance of the function of the medium of circulation is fleeting; having serviced one commodity transaction, it then goes on to service the next, and so on. The fleeting nature of this function makes it possible to replace full-value money with substitutes of inferior value (for instance, copper money), or paper tokens of value.
and becomes immovable. In that event, it begins to perform a new function, that of a means for the formation of hoards.
As a hoard, money represents wealth generally. This function can be performed not only by gold coins, but also by the money material in its immediate natural form: gold bullions, articles made of gold, etc.
Money acts as a means of payment (unit of account) when payment for the commodities sold is postponed. The buyers pay money for the commodities only when the date of payment falls due. Consequently, in that event money enters into currency only after a definite lapse of time. In this way, the function of the means of payment reflects the further development of production and commercial ties between men.
The functioning of money as a means of payment is not confined to the sphere of commodity circulation. Money also performs that function in the loan of money, the payment of rent, and the payment of taxes.
The sphere of this function is expanded by the development of credit and the credit system. In large transactions under developed capitalism, money operates mainly as the means of payment. The development of credit relations creates the possibility of cancelling debts by means of mutual write-offs of promissory notes without the involvement of ready money. Under private property in the means of production, this system of settlements contains within itself a contradiction which is rooted in the very nature of relations between private commodity producers. Where a debtor is unable to sell his commodity in due time or recoups a lesser amount in its sale than he had anticipated in consequence of a drop in prices, he finds himself unable to pay his debt. This entails non-payment not only by the given commodity producer, but also by his creditor. In a chain reaction, this will affect the interests of a large number of commodity producers who have sold their goods on credit.
This contradiction is expressed most acutely during economic crises of overproduction. Failure to pay on a number of transactions tends to undermine the confidence of commodity producers in each other, and there begins a rush for ready money. It turns out that it is gold, the real money commodity and not promissory notes, that is the real money in the capitalist economy.
75Money as a Means of Hoarding. Money as a Means of Payment
For various reasons, the process of circulation may bo interrupted, as a result of which money ceases to circulate
74World Money
Within a given country, tokens of value may be substituted for the money commodity in the fulfilment of some of its functions. International payments require the functioning of money in its natural form, in the form of ingots of the precious metal. Gold is the world money. Gold operates on the world market as the universal means of payment and the universal instrument of purchase. There it functions as an absolute social materialisation of wealth (when capital is transferred from one country to another).
With the development of world trade and credit relations, a country's currency which has the greatest weight in that trade and which extends sizable credits to other countries obtains some advantages, because the settlements between countries are effected in that currency.
Besides, the development of world economic ties leads to the emergence of various international means of settlement as substitutes for gold. But to the extent that world money must, by its very nature, appear in the direct form of gold, the means of settlement representing world money must be freely convertible into gold. Whenever they are not, there is a world payments crisis.
The Quantity of Money Necessary for Circulation
The circulation of commodities determines the currency of money. That is why the quantity of money required for circulation depends above all on the sum-total of the prices of commodities. Furthermore, there is a need to take account of the velocity of currency. It follows that the quantity of money required for circulation is equal to the sum-total of the prices of commodities divided by the velocity of currency (of one and the same monetary unit: rubles, marks, dollars, etc.). As a result, the quantity of money required for circulation (Q) is determined by three factors: 1) the quantity of commodities (C); their prices (/>); and 3) the velocity of currency (VC). This equation may be expressed by the following formula:
the conditions of production, the development of transport, the state of economic ties, the development of the credit system, etc.
In view of the fact that money is not only the means of circulation but also the means of payment, the full formula for the law of the currency of money assumes the following form:
-PW
v
VC
The quantity of money in circulation is equal to the sumtotal of the prices of commodities up for sale (CP) minus the sum-total of the prices of commodities sold on credit (CT) plus payments fallen due (Pa) minus the amount of mutual payments write-offs (PW) and all of this divided by the number of circuits of the given currency units (VC).
One of the most popular bourgeois theories of money is the quantity theory, according to which the value of money is determined by its quantity in circulation. It claims that commodities enter into circulation without price, and money without value, and that price fully takes shape only in the process of circulation. The mass of money is simply exchanged for the mass of commodities. But in fact, money, the money commodity, like all other commodities, has a value of its own, and this is formed even before the process of circulation, in the process of production. That is why it is not the prices of commodities that depend on the quantity of money, but the quantity of full-value money in currency that depends on the value of the money commodity and on the sum-total of prices expressing the total value of the given commodities.
Paper Money
The development of currency brings out the possibility of substituting for money tokens which have no value of their own. Even gold coins are worn out in the process of circulation and, in effect, become an inferior token, a symbol of their erstwhile value. Hence the appearance of inferior coins as substitutes for gold (silver, copper, nickel, etc. coins) and then also of paper money. Like inferior coins, paper money substitutes for gold, the money commodity, in circulation. However, the function of the standard of value is still performed by gold even with the currency of paper
--
vc
The purchase and sale of commodities, the speed of the process, together with the velocity of currency, depend on
70 77money, because the latter has no value of its own and is merely a token of the gold.
Paper money is introduced into currency by the stale, which establishes its compulsory rate of exchange. But the real value represented by paper money depends on the objective law of the currency of money. When paper money is issued in quantities necessary for the currency of gold money, it circulates according to the value of the gold coins for which it is a substitute. Whenever the quantity of paper money ceases to correspond to the requirements of commodity circulation in gold money, the quantity of gold represented by each paper money unit will deviate from its denominated value. If the quantity of money issued is, say, double that which is necessary for the currency of the corresponding gold coins, each paper money unit will represent only onehalf of the value of the corresponding gold unit. As a result, the sum-total of the prices of commodities will double.
The excessive issue of paper money and its depreciation is used in the capitalist world as a means of increasing the profits of the bourgeoisie and of depressing the real incomes of the working people, so as to get them to shoulder the burden of budget deficits caused by the aggressive policy of imperialist states.
The bourgeois nominalist theory of money frequently seeks to justify the excessive issue of paper money by presenting money as a nominal unit of account which has no material content. It says that money is no more than a token which has no intrinsic value, a mere unit of account, and that money is the product of state power which determines its value. But this theory cannot explain how the value of commodities is measured and compared by means of objects which have no value of their own. In fact, paper money is the representative of the money commodity which has value, and that is precisely what is expressed when paper money depreciates as a result of its excessive issue.
ance with the labour time socially necessary for their production, that is, in accordance with their social value. When commodities are exchanged at social value, the commodity producers whose individual expenditures of labour in the production of the given commodity turn out to be smaller than the socially necessary ones, gain, while those whose expenditures are larger than the socially necessary ones, lose. The law of value forces commodity producers to see to it that inputs going into the production of commodities should not be in excess of those socially necessary.
Under private property, the law of value acts as a spontaneous regulator of commodity production. The price coincides with the value of a commodity only when supply is equal to demand, that is, only when the production of a given commodity corresponds to effective demand. Otherwise, the price of the commodity will deviate from its value. An excess of market price over value tends to stimulate the production of commodities, but a drop of price below value causes a contraction in the production of commodities. Accordingly, there is a redistribution of labour and the means of production among the sectors of the economy.
The fluctuation of prices round value is determined not only by spontaneous fluctuations in the sphere of circulation---the market---but also by changes in the sphere of production. Changes in the productivity of labour, which determine changes in the magnitude of the value of a product unit also cause, through the fluctuation of prices, a redistribution of labour between the branches of production.
With the spontaneous regulation of production, producers learn of society's actual requirements only after they have produced their commodities, and this inevitably results in sizable economic losses.
The law of value induces commodity producers to reduce individual labour inputs as compared with those socially necessary. The most favourable conditions for this are available to large-scale production, which has the greatest potentialities for boosting labour productivity and cutting the cost of commodities, and also more flexibly adapting itself to the market. The spontaneous fluctuation of prices round value inevitably results in the ruin of the bulk of the middle and small commodity producers, who are turned into proletarians deprived of the means of production and forced to do wage labour for the owners of enterprises. Meanwhile,
5. THE LAW OF VALUE
The law of value is an objective economic law of commodity production. When products are produced as commodities, expenditures of social labour inevitably assume the form of value and the exchange of commodities takes place in accord-
78 79a small number of commodity producers is enriched and turned into capitalists, exploiting the labour of others. Consequently, the operation of the law of value results in a stratification of simple commodity producers, in their differentiation, and in the development of capitalist relations of production.
The problem of stratification among the simple commodity producers is considered in detail in Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia. His study of these processes was an important prerequisite for substantiating the need for an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry in the fight against capitalism. Lenin showed that small commodity production generates capitalism constantly and on a massive scale.
The spontaneous operation of the law of value, as a regulator of production, induces a rise in labour productivity, while resulting in a tremendous waste of social labour, sharpening the antagonistic contradictions of commodity production based on private property in the means of production. Bourgeois ideologists have trotted out a number of apologetic theories to counter Marx's labour theory of value. One of these is the supply and demand theory, which denies that value has an intrinsic content, and usually reduces it to a purely quantitative equation. Another theory of value says that the prices of commodities are determined by the cost of their production, that is, by the sum-total of the prices of commodities expended on their production. Present-day bourgeois economists widely advocate the theory, which Marx criticised in his lifetime, and which says that value results from the operation of the three factors of production: labour, capital (embodied in the means of production) and land. The Marxist analysis shows that value is created by labour. It is the basis of all life in society, of the relations between commodity producers, and determines all their economic ties.
The marginal utility theory, with its subjective treatment of value, is also widespread. It claims that value is a subjective assessment of commodities and that it is determined by their utility. In actual fact, value does not result from psychological evaluations but is an objective economic relation. Whatever these evaluations, that commodity will have the greater value on which more socially necessary labour is expended. All these bourgeois theories are designed to cover
80up the exploitation of the working people by capital and to divert them from the class struggle, which is why they seek to distort the actual social relations.
Fetishism of Commodity
Under private property in the means of production, the ties between commodity producers in the process of production, which are determined by the social division of labour, are expressed in the exchange of the products of their labour, through the movement, of commodities. The social character of private labour and its social recognition are brought out only in the spontaneous process of exchange. Consequently, social relations among commodity producers assume the form of relations among things, they are reified. The sway of social relations over men assumes the outward form of their domination by definite things. The commodity producers' dependence on the market is expressed as their domination by some supernatural power of things (commodities and money). This reification of the relations of production, that is, the appearance of relations among men in the form of relations among things was designated by Marx as the fetishism of commodities.
The cult of money which rules the capitalist world is the supreme expression of the fetishism of commodities. This is a historical category and exists only under private property commodity production.
6-245
Chapter four
CAPITAL AND SURPLUS VALUE. THE BASIC ECONOMIC LAW OF CAPITALISM
Having examined the labour theory of value, which helped to discover the laws of the capitalist mode of production, we now go on to a consideration of capitalist production, the internal causal nexus between its factors, and the content and mechanism of the basic economic law of capitalism. These problems are analysed by Marx in Chapters IV-XVI of Volume I of Capital.
is expressed in the following circuit: M---C---M', where M' = M + AM, that is, it is equal to the originally advanced sum of money plus a certain increment. This increment, or excess over the originally advanced value, is designated by Marx as surplus value. The circuit M---C-^-M' converts the originally advanced value into capital. The originally advanced value is not only preserved in the circulation but also increases as a result of the addition to it of surplus value. Consequently, capital is self-expanding value, or value which begets surplus value. The circulation of money as capital has the purpose of increasing capital.
The M---C---M' formula is the general formula of capital as it appears directly in the sphere of circulation. It applies to every type of capital: merchants', usury and industrial capital (the predominanrtiorm of capital under capitalism).
Contradictions in the General Formula of Capital
The circuit M---C---M' of capital does not show where and how surplus value is created. This process---the buying of a commodity in order to sell it---occurs in the sphere of circulation, where only the form of value is altered: the money form is converted into the commodity form, and the commodity form into the money form. According to the law of value, the exchange of commodities is effected in accordance with the labour time socially necessary for their production. Consequently, in the sphere of circulation there is no increase in value.
Nor do we find an answer to the question by assuming that in the individual acts of exchange commodities are bought and sold at prices which deviate from value. If the price of a commodity is higher than its value, the seller of the commodity gains and the buyer loses. Conversely, if the price of a commodity is lower than its value, the buyer of the commodity gains and the seller loses. The capitalist alternately acts as seller and buyer. Consequently, with the prices of commodities deviating from their values, the capitalist will lose as buyer while gaining as seller. Assuming that because of the discrepancy between prices and values, individual capitalists or a group of capitalists receive more money than they have originally advanced, as so often happens in reality. But this explains only the enrichment of the individual capitalists, which occurs through the redistrib-
i. THE CONVERSION OF MONEY INTO CAPITAL The General Formula for Capital
The objective prerequisite for the origination of capital is a definite level in the development of commodity production and commodity-money circulation. Historically, capital starts out on its career as merchants' and usury capital in the form of money. Each new capital on the commodity market, the labour market or the money market also appears in the form of money, which is converted into capital only through a definite set of processes.
Money as money, and money as capital first differ from each other only in their different forms of circulation. The form of commodity circulation is: C (commodity)---M ( money)---C (commodity). In this form, the sale of the commodity is performed for the purpose of buying another commodity. Here there is an exchange of the different use values for the sake of satisfying some immediate requirements. The form of the circulation of money as capital is different: M---C---M, which means that the purchase is performed for the purpose of sale, for the purpose of enrichment. That is why the full form of the circulation of money as capital
826»
83'lition of already created value. The whole class of-- capitalists, however, cannot grow, rich at its own expense, because circulation does not create value. Consequently, the deviation of the prices of commodities from their values does not explain the origination and increase of value, nor the conversion 'of money into capital. Analysis of circulation shows that surplus value cannot originate from circulation, which amounts to the sum-total of all the exchange relations among commodity producers.
• But the capitalist is unable to obtain surplus value unless he enters into the-process of circulation* The value of .a manufactured product is greater than the value of the material expended on its production (for instance, the value of .a suit is greater than the value of the fabrics of which it is made). Consequently, a new value is added to the value of the materials as a result of the labour expended by the workers in the process of production. But that does not in itself mean that the new value is the source of the capitalist's profit. In order to convert his money into capital, into an expanding value, the capitalist must sell his commodity by entering into commerce with other commodity owners, on the market. "It is therefore impossible for capital to-be produced by circulation, and. it'is equally-impossible for-it to originate apart from circulations • It .must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation,"^^1^^. -
...
In order to discover the source of expanding value, let us consider the material elements of the circuit M---C---M!. Is it here that the mystery of surplus value lies hidden? Money, which is to be converted into capital, cannot of itself be. the source of surplus values It operates as the means of purchase and payment and helps to realise the price .of the .commodi.- ties for which it is paid. The value of a commodity acquired in the first act M---C cannot be the creator of surplus value either, because there is an exchange of equivalents. The change in value and its expansion,,can arise, only from the consumption of the goods which the capitalist buys to effect the process of production. Consequently, the .capitalist finds on the market, in the sphere of circulation, a com, niodity whose use value has the property of creating value, and one that is greater than its own. It is labour power that is this specific commodity.
2. LABOUR POWER AS A COMMODITY The Conversion of Labour Tower into a Commodity
Labour power is "the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of .any description".1 Labour power, as the human capacity for' labour, will be found in any society, whatever its historical form. Under capitalism, it becomes a commodity.
When and how does labour power become a commodity?
First, when the owner of the labour power is a free man. On the market, the owner of the labour power, as the seller^ meets the owner of the money,, as the buyer. The continuanceof this relation .requires that the owner of the labour power should sell it only for a definite period, for otherwise the owner of the labour power would be converted from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a mere commodity.
Second, labour power becomes a commodity when its owner is deprived of the means of production and the means of subsistence. If he had any means of production, he would sell on the market the commodities embodying his labour, as the small commodity producers---the peasants and the artisans---do.
. . .
Under capitalism, labour power, being a commodity, has two properties which are inherent in every commodity: use value and value.
The Value of the Commodity Labour Power
The value of labour power, like that of any other commodity, is determined by the labour time necessary for its production and reproduction. Labour power, as human capacity for labour, is inseparable from the living individual. That is why its production and reproduction mean,.above all, the reproduction of man himself, the preservation of his normal vital activity. '
., :, .
i
The means of subsistence necessary for satisfying the worker's requirements have a definite value. Consequently,,the labour time necessary for the reproduction of labour power amounts to the labour time necessary for creating such means of., subsistence, so that tlie value of the labouf ,pojyer is
* Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 164. ' ' '""'"""......'!
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 163.
the value of the means of subsistence required for the maintenance of its owner's life. Climate and other natural conditions in a given country have an influence on the volume and structure of natural requirements. The means of subsistence necessary for the reproduction of labour power are not limited to the means for satisfying a man's natural wants in food, clothing, housing and fuel. These also include the means for satisfying spiritual requirements. The expenditures for the satisfaction of such requirements also form part of the value of labour power.
Human wants are not innate or prescribed for men by nature. They are the product of social development. The volume and structure of human requirements and the mode of their satisfaction depend on the economic and cultural development in a given country and largely also on the conditions in which the vital requirements of the working class have been shaped. Thus, in the developed capitalist countries, the volume of workers' requirements is much larger than that of workers in economically less developed countries. Marx says: " In contradistinction therefore to the case of other commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element. Nevertheless, in a given country, at a given period, the average quantity of the means of subsistence necessary for the labourer is practically known.''^^1^^
The continuous conversion of money into capital requires the constant perpetuation of workers, who are only mortal and whose organism is rapidly worn out. The labour market is replenished above all by the children of workers.^^2^^ That is why the value of the means of subsistence required for the reproduction of labour power also includes the value of the means of subsistence of the workers' families. Furthermore, the worker must have skill and handiness in a given field of labour. That is why the cost of acquiring such skills and knowledge, that is, education and training, form a part of the value of labour power. The'higher a worker's'skill standard, the greater the value of his labour power.
Consequently, the value of labour power is the value of the means of subsistence required for its reproduction, which must
be of normal quality. Labour power tends to change with the development of production, with the progress in the means of production. The worker's craftsmanship, skill and experience increase. Human wants tend to grow. For every stage in the development of production there is a corresponding socially normal quality of labour power. The bottom, or minimum, limit of the value of labour power is determined by the value of the means of subsistence physically indispensable for the worker's existence and for the maintenance of his capacity for work.
As capitalism developes, the value of labour power is lowered or raised through the operation of various factors. Among those which tend to lower the value of the commodity labour power is, above all, the growth in the productivity of social labour, as a result of which the value of the worker's means of subsistence, and so of the labour power itself, is lowered. The ever broader involvement of members of working-class families---women and children---also tends to lower the value of labour power.
Among the factors raising the value of labour power are the rise in the worker's skill standards and the inclusion of new commodities and services among his own requirements and those of his family. The current scientific and technical revolution makes ever greater demands on the general educational and special training of the workers. As production develops, the mix of products consumed by the worker tends to change, there is a growth of spending on new everyday services, and new social and spiritual requirements appear.
The value of labour power also increases because of the greater intensity of the workers' labour. This makes him expend more energy, which is why he needs more means of subsistence.
The nature of capitalism is such that it tends to depress the value of labour power with the growth in the productivity of labour. Material production simultaneously generates factors which cause a tendency towards an increase of its value. The one or the other tendency predominates at various stages of the capitalist mode of production and in the various countries. At the same time, there is a tendency for the price of labour power to decline as compared with its value, and it is only the workers' resistance and struggles that help to block this tendency.
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 168.
~^^2^^ The labour market is also filled with ruined small commodity producers, artisans and peasants.
87The value of labour power expresses the relations of production under capitalism, the sale and purchase of labour power and its use by the owners of the means of production to extract surplus value.
3. THE PRODUCTION OF SURPLUS VALUE
The Character of Capitalist Production: the Process of Labour and of the Expansion of Value
In the capitalist society, the conjunction of labour power and the means of production is effected through the acts of purchase and sale on the market, where the capitalist buys the labour power and the means of production. That is why labour appears as a process in which the capitalist consumes the wage worker's labour power. There are two characteristic aspects to this labour process. First, it is performed for the capitalist and under his control. He has a monopoly ownership in the means of production, and in the course of the labour time disposes of the labour power which he has bought as a commodity. Second, the product created in the process of production does not belong to the wage worker, the man who actually produced it, but to the capitalist.
tWhen buying the means of production and labour power, the capitalist, wants, first, to produce a use value which would have exchange value, that is, a commodity; second, to produce a commodity whose value would be greater than the value of the factors consumed in the process of labour, for otherwise it is impossible to obtain surplus value. The production of use value is necessary to the extent that it is the material vehicle of value. The capitalist takes an interest in the creation of commodities as the source for the extraction of surplus value.
The value advanced by the capitalist increases because the workers work more time than is required for the reproduction of the equivalent of the value of their labour power. The value of the labour power and the value created in the process of its consumption are two different magnitudes. It is the expenditure of labour over and above the limit required for the reproduction of the equivalent of the value of labour power that is the source of surplus value. Marx says: "The process of production, considered, on the one hand, as the unity of the labour-process and the process of creating value, is production of commodities; considered, on the other hand, as the unity of the labour-process and the process of producing surplus-value, it is the capitalist process of production, or capitalist production of commodities.''^^1^^
'» Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 191.
89^^1^^
The Use Value of the Commodity Labour Power
A distinction needs to be drawn between the capacity for labour and labour itself. Marx says: "When we speak of capacity for labour, we do not speak of labour, any more than when we speak of capacity for digestion, we speak of digestion.''^^1^^ Labour is the process in which labour power is consumed, the process of the production of commodities, value and surplus value. In contradistinction to other commodities, labour power creates value, and one which is greater than its own. The excess value created by the worker's labour over and above the value of his labour power constitutes surplus value. It is this special use value of labour power that commands the capitalist's interest.
Having bought labour power on the market, the capitalist uses its use value in the process of production, outside the framework of circulation. He makes the worker expend a greater quantity of labour than is required for the reproduction of the means of subsistence the worker needs.
On the market> the capitalist and the worker outwardly meet each other as equal commodity owners: one as the buyer, and the other as the seller. Accordingly, bourgeois economists seek to prove^ that there are no contradictions between labour and capital. Marxishowed that there can be no equality between them---and there is, in fact, none---and that, consequently, there is: no community, of interests in the,capitalist society, for the means of production are monopolised by the bourgeoisie,, while the workers have none. In order .to purchase the means of subsistence they.,have ito sell their; capacity of labour to the capitalists, thereby enabling the owners of the means of production to enrich themselves by appropriating the surplus value created by the workers.
,.
s
~^^1^^ Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 170.
The production and appropriation of surplus value are effected on the basis of the law of value: the capitalists buy the factors of the labour process---the means of production and labour power---at value. But, as Marx shows, even if the capitalists paid the full value of the labour power they would still extract surplus value from the workers' labour. He demonstrates that the obtaining of surplus value is not a casual phenomenon, but the objective law-governed process of capitalist production.
The production and appropriation of surplus value implies the unity of circulation and production. In the sphere of circulation, the capitalist buys the commodities: labour power and the means of production. In the sphere of production, the advanced value is increased as a result of the wage workers' labour, and surplus value is created. It is realised in the sphere of circulation, when the capitalist sells the produced commodities, with surplus value assuming the form of money.
Necessary and Surplus Labour Time
The working day is divided into two parts. One part of it consists of the time needed by the worker to produce the equivalent of the value of labour power. Marx designated this time as necessary labour time, and the labour expended in the course of this time, as necessary labour.
The other part of the working day consists of surplus working time, that is, labour time continued beyond the limits of necessary labour time. The labour expended in the course of surplus labour time is the surplus labour which creates the surplus product. The surplus labour and the surplus product, which it creates (that is, the product over and above that necessary for the worker's existence), will be found in any society, but only under capitalism is the surplus product the material vehicle of surplus value. This is due to the fact that capitalism is the universal form of commodity production, under which man's labour power also becomes a commodity.
Surplus value is the specific form of the surplus product created by the labour of wage workers and gratuitously appropriated by the capitalists. It characterises the relations of production between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which express the wage workers' exploitation by the capitalists, and which are the source of incomes of the exploiter
90classes in the capitalist society: the capitalists and the big landed proprietors. The capitalist system is based on the surplus labour of wage workers.
Even before the capitalist mode of production came on the scene, under the slave-owning system and feudalism, man was exploited by man, but each socio-economic formation based on private property in the means of production and exploitation of man by man had its own socio-economic form of labour organisation and appropriation of surplus labour by the exploiters. Thus, the exploitation of serfs was based on a combination of economic and extra-economic coercion to labour. Under capitalism, the producer is coerced to labour mainly by economic means. Wage workers are free of any personal dependence. But being deprived of the means of production and the means of subsistence, they are forced to sell their capacity for labour to the capitalists. In this way, the wage worker, while not being the property of this or that capitalist, belongs to the whole class of capitalists and his labour is, in effect, coercive. The wage labour system is a system of wage slavery.
The veiled character of coercive labour is the distinctive feature of capitalist exploitation. Because the worker is a free man and sells his labour power, the coercive character of his labour, his dependence on the capitalist, and the latter's gratuitous appropriation of surplus labour are obscured.
The peculiarity of the capitalist exploitation, which springs from the very nature of capitalist production, is the boundless urge to appropriate the results of surplus labour. This produces new and unprecedented methods of labour exploitation.
4. THE SUBSTANCE OF CAPITAL: CONSTANT AND VARIABLE CAPITAL
Capital as a Social Relation
Whatever the form capital assumes, wherever it is applied, it is always a relation of exploitation, a means for the appropriation of the labour of others. Industrial capital, as a self-expanding value, has its own peculiarities. It is a production relation of the capitalist society, a relation between its two chief classes: the class of capitalists and the class of wage workers. The substance of this production
91relation is the wage workers' exploitation by the capitalists, who have monopoly ownership of the means of production. Industrial capital is an instrument for the exploitation of wage labour. Marx says: "Capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation, belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specific social character.'*^^1^^ •
Capital exists in the form of a definite amount of money owned by the capitalists, and in material content consists of the means of production he has purchased, and also in the form of the finished goods produced at the capitalist enterprise. But money, the means of production and the means of subsistence are converted into capital only when they are used to obtain surplus value, when they are used as an instrument of exploitation.
When bourgeois economists define capital, they try to strip it of its social-class substance, by identifying it With money or with the means of production as material factors of any production. Thus, the well-known US economist Paul Samuelson regards capital only as a mediating factor of production. Other bourgeois economists insist that capital is anything that has a utility in production: means of production, land, minerals, consumer goods, labour power. They claim that capital is a perpetual, extra-historical category, because things, the means of production, will be found in any socio-economic formation. They deny that there is any difference between capitalism and socialism, the two opposite socio-economic systems, on the plea that the means of production are required to produce goods in either society. But, says Marx, while the means of production are, indeed, the material factor of any process of labour, only in the capitalist society are they converted into capital, into an instrument for the appropriation of the wage workers,' surplus labour.
Constant and Variable Capital
The capitalist organising production converts his capital (initially appearing in the form of money) into the factors of labour: the means of production and labour power. Thus, the means of production and the labour power bought by the
capitalist are only a different form for the existence of the initial capital value.
The means of production and labour power have a different role to play in the formation of the value of the product. In the process of labour, labour power consumes the means of production and creates a new product. The means of production, while having lost the initial form of their use value, retain their value, which is transferred to the new product.
The transfer of the value of the means of production occurs simultaneously with the addition by the worker of a new value to the object of labour. This twofold result of production is effected by the worker because of the dual nature of his labour, At one,and the same time, his concrete labour creates a use value and transfers to it the value of the means of production, while his abstract labour creates a new value and(adds'it to the old value. The new value, created by the labour of the wage worker, contains within itself the`e' quivalent of the value of his labour power and surplus value.
That part of capital which Is converted into the means of production and does hot change the magnitude of its value in the process of labour was designated by Marx -a's constant 'capital. That part of capital which is converted into labour power and changes its value in the process of production he called variable ca'pltal.^^1^^' '.:
If production is seen as a labour process, the component •parts of capital .appear.as objective and subjective factors, as the means of production and labour power. If production is seen as a process in Which value is increased, these same factors appear as constant and variable capital. The value of constant capital, that is, the means of production consumed in the process of production, is retained unchanged in the finished prpduct. The value of the variable capital, which is equal to the value of the labour power bought by the capitalist, increases in the process of production, because by applying his labour the worker creates a new value which is equal to the magnitude of the variable capital and the surplus value. Consequently, surplus value is an increase only of variable capital. The magnitude of the newly created
~^^1^^ Karl Marx; Capital, Vol. Ill, p. 814.
~^^1^^ Marx designates surplus value by the letter ``m'' (Mehrwert); constant capital by ``c'' (constant); and variable capital by "i>" ( variable).
93 922value may be expressed as v + m, where v is the reproduced value of the labour power, and m---the surplus value.
The value of the commodities (w) produced at capitalist enterprises is expressed by the following formula: w---c -- f-f v + m. This value reflects the relations of production in the capitalist society and the exploitation of the wage workers by the capitalists.
Rate and Mass of Surplus Value
The mass of surplus value appropriated by the capitalist is its alsolute magnitude. The relative magnitude of surplus value, or the extent to which variable capital increases, is determined by the ratio of surplus value to variable capital:
(----)• Marx called this ratio, expressed as a percentage, the
rate of surplus value, and designated it with the letter m'. The value of labour power, and the value of variable capital are determined by the expenditure of labour required for the reproduction of labour power. In other words, variable capital is reproduced throughout the necessary labour time by the worker's necessary labour. Surplus value is created in the surplus time by the worker's surplus labour. That is why surplus value relates to variable capital, as surplus labour to necessary labour, or
Working day to reproduce his labour power, and half---for the capitalist, the degree of exploitation equals 100 per cent.
In an article entitled ``Workers' Earnings and Capitalist Profits in Russia"^^1^^, Lenin considered a worker who created 498 roubles' worth of new value a year. Of this amount, the capitalist gave him back 246 roubles in the form of wages, and retained 252 roubles as his profit. Comparing the worker's wage and the capitalist's profit, Lenin pointed out that the worker spent less than half a day working for himself, and more than half---for the capitalist. Consequently, in prerevolutionary Russia the degree of workers' exploitation was in excess of 100 per cent.
With a given value of labour power, the rate of surplus value determines the mass of surplus value produced by the individual worker. The greater the degree of exploitation, the larger the mass of surplus value, which depends on the rate of surplus value and the number of workers employed.
With the development of capitalism, the rate of surplus value tends to grow. This means that there is growing exploitation of the workers. Thus, in the developed capitalist countries it used to average about 100 per cent, but now comes to 300 per cent and more.
The growing exploitation of the workers springs from the capitalists' insatiable greed for surplus value and also from the competition between them.
5. TWO WAYS OF INCREASING THE DEGREE
OF EXPLOITATION OF THE WORKING CLASS
Absolute Surplus Value
One way of increasing the degree of exploitation and the mass of surplus value is to lengthen the working day. Under capitalism, the working day is the sum-total of the necessary and the surplus working time, which means that it consists of periods of time in the course of which the worker reproduces the equivalent of the value of his labour power and creates surplus value.
That part of the working day in the course of which the
, m
m-----------------------, -f-------
v necessary labour
In the first instance (---), the rate of surplus value is expressed in the form of materialised labour; in the second
/ surplus labour \ . ., ,.
,,
.11
mi x-
------------r-r---in the form of current labour. The ratio
Vnecessary labour/
f
i i v.
4.
i i,
I surplus labour \
ot surplus labour to necessary labour------------^---.----
\ necessary labour /
expresses the degree of the producer's exploitation by the owner of the means of production in any antagonistic society
„- while the ratio of surplus value to variable capital (---) is
/ \
\ v /
( /the specific form expressing the degree of exploitation of wage workers by capitalists.
The rate of surplus value shows how the newly created value (v -j- m) is distributed between the capitalist and the wage worker, and also which part of the working day is spent by the worker on the reproduction of his labour power, and which part---on the capitalist. If a worker works half the
94~^^1^^ V. I. Lenin, ``Workers' Earnings and Capitalist Profits in Russia", Collected Works, Vol. 18, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973 pp. 256-- 257.
95equivalent of the value of labour power is reproduced under the given conditions of production and at the given stage of society's economic development is a constant magnitude. Once the necessary working time is known, the surplus time and, consequently, the rate of surplus value depend on a lengthening of the working day beyond the limits of necessary labour time. Let us assume that the working day is equal to ten hours, of which 5 hours is the necessary working time and 5---the surplus working time. If the working day is increased from 10 to 12 hours (the value of the labour power remaining unchanged) the surplus working time increases from 5 to 7 hours. If the surplus working time increases, the degree of exploitation also increases. With a working day of 10 hours, the degree of exploitation comes to 100 per
social bounds, within which the rehabilitation of normalquality labour power is ensured.
The struggle for a shorter working day is an organic part of the proletariat's class struggle. The shorter week today is the result of the age-old class struggle between the capitalists and the workers. But this struggle brings about no more than a certain improvement of the conditions in which the proletarians apply their labour power. The socialist revolution alone emancipates the working people from exploitation and ensures a radical improvement of their conditions.
The production of absolute surplus value is achieved not only through a lengthening of the duration of the working day. The capitalists also try hard to intensify labour. Once labour is intensified, the worker expends more vital force in the same working time, and so creates more value and more surplus value. The production of absolute surplus value and the increase in the degree of exploitation of the working class are achieved through a longer working day, more intense labour, overtime, and payment for labour power below its value.
Relative Surplus Value
Another way of increasing the degree of exploitation and surplus value entails the capitalists' use for their own benefit of scientific and technical achievements and the growing social productivity of labour. Here, surplus value is increased through a reduction of the necessary working time and a corresponding increase in surplus working time.
Rising labour productivity in industries turning out consumer goods for workers and in industries turning out the means of production for manufacturing these consumer goods . helps to reduce their value and, consequently, also the necessary working time.
Let us take a 10-hour working day, in the course of which 5 hours are necessary working time and 5 hours---surplus time. Assuming that, as a result of the cheapening of consumer goods, the necessary working time is cut by one hour and comes to 4 hours, in that case the surplus working time increases to 6 hours. In consequence of the change in the ratio between the necessary and the surplus working time, the degree of exploitation in this example goes up from 100 per cent to 150 per cent. The mass of surplus value is also increased.
cent
X 100), and with a 12-hour working day---
' 7 hours „
i5 hours
The surplus value obtained through an absolute lengthening of the working day was designated by Marx as absolute surplus value.
The production of absolute surplus value constitutes the universal basis of capitalist exploitation, but it was predominant at the early stages in the development of capitalism, before large-scale machine production came on the scene.
The Limits of the Working Day. The Working-Class Struggle for Its Reduction
The working day has its limits, and its duration can change only within those limits. The maximum limit of the working day is determined by two factors: first, the physical bounds of labour power. Within the 24 hours of the natural day, a man can expend only a definite quantity of vital force. He needs time for leisure and for satisfying other physical needs to restore his expended vital force. Second, the maximum duration of the working day has social limitations. The labourer needs time for satisfying not only his physiological wants, but also his intellectual and social needs. The extent of these needs and the ways of satisfying them depend on the level of a country's development, the general state of its culture, and the historical condition in which the working class has taken shape. The -variation of the working day fluctuates between its physical and
967-0245
97The surplus value obtained through a reduction in the necessary working time and the corresponding increase in the surplus working time was designated by Marx as relative surplus value.
Extra Surplus Value
At enterprises where new machinery and improved methods of production are used, individual labour productivity tends to rise above its social level. The individual value of the commodities produced in these conditions is lower than their social value. And because commodities are sold at their social value, this guarantees the capitalists who own these enterprises extra surplus value. The owner of the commodities produced by highly productive labour has advantages in the competition with his rivals. He is able to sell his commodities at a price below the social value, while still extracting a part of the extra surplus value.
Individual labour productivity may rise and the individual value of a commodity may fall, not only in the production of consumer goods for the worker, but also of any other commodity. That is why the production and appropriation of extra surplus value does not result in a lowering of the value of labour power.
But whenever individual labour productivity rises above its social level, the value of labour power is reproduced in a shorter working time. The labour that is more productive than social labour functions as multiplied labour, that is, creates in equal periods of time a social value that is greater than that produced by socially necessary labour. Consequently, the source of extra surplus value is the more productive labour of workers at enterprises with new machinery and better production techniques. As the improved implements of labour and production techniques spread generally throughout a given industry, the social value of the commodity tends to decline and the differential between the social and the individual value of the commodity to disappear, together with the extra? surplus value. Whenever the rise in labour productivity spreads to industries whose commodities are among the workers' necessary means of subsistence the general rate of surplus value tends to increase.
The extraction of extra surplus value in the capitalist society is natural and commonplace. It disappears at some enterprises and appears at others. In the drive for extra sur-
plus value, the capitalists install new machinery and use improved techniques in production. This, on the whole, results in a development of society's productive forces. But each capitalist seeks to keep his technical innovations secret from the others, because the longer the time in the course of which the individual capitalist or groups of capitalists enjoy a monopoly on the new production techniques, the longer is the time in the course of which they obtain extra surplus value. The concealment of technical innovations exerts a drag on technical progress. Consequently, under capitalism the development of the productive forces is contradictory and antagonistic. Technical progress creates the prerequisites for the even greater enrichment of the bourgeoisie and a worsening of the condition of the working class.
6. THREE STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALIST INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION
Analysing the production of relative surplus value, Marx brought out the three main historical stages in the growth of labour productivity under capitalism leading to a growth of relative surplus value: 1) simple capitalist cooperation of labour; 2) division of labour and manufacture; and 3) machinery and large-scale industry. These three stages reflect the process in which the capitalist mode of production originated and was established.
In The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin used a vast array of statistical data to study the development of capitalism in Russia at its three successive stages.
Simple Cooperation
Capitalist production starts at the point at which one capital simultaneously employs many workers. Capitalist enterprises first appeared in the form of simple capitalist cooperation of labour. The cooperation of labour is a form of labour organisation under which "numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes".^^1^^ The cooperation of
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 308.
987*
99